Chicken: Fried, BBQ, Roasted
a personal essay about my dad
Not So Secret Agent is typically a newsletter all about non-fiction publishing through my lens as a hyperspecialized cookbook literary agent. Today’s post, however, invites you into a more personal part of my life. Though I am nervous to share a different type of writing, I feel ready because the subject matter is important to me. Also, it’s an opportunity to reciprocate the closeness and warmth I feel here back to you, the amazing readers in this NSSA newsletter community.
I respect you all tremendously and in today’s case, lean on you a bit. Feel free to skip if this is not your jam. Truly. Regularly scheduled publishing content will continue as usual. Thank you for being here.
Trigger warning: Today’s post discusses caregiving, terminal cancer, and death. Please take care of yourself if/as you choose to read on.
Dear Not So Secret Agent readers,
This is a complicated newsletter because I updated the originally saved draft, dated September 8th, 2025, just 20 days before my dad died. The timeline should give you a sense of how quickly the decline happened. I had been sitting by his side, reading the draft out loud to him and my stepmom, to ensure they were both comfortable with what I was going to share. Then, in a matter of just a few days, my dad could no longer keep his eyes open or stay focused on the words spoken around him.
I have decided to publish today’s newsletter with PART ONE true to the originally drafted piece. I don’t know why exactly, but I’m certain my dad would have appreciated the oddity of publishing this newsletter in a way that flaunts the disorienting relationship between time and grief.
Time and life are weird. Especially when grief gets involved. Here we go.
PART ONE: September 8th, 2025
My parents got divorced when I was about 11. The timeline and exact details are fuzzy due to my age and dedication to self-preservation. For me, past traumatic events are more clearly punctuated by taste memories than anything else. So much more fun, AMIRIGHT?
Reflecting on my parents’ divorce, and even up through so much of my recent life, I realize that a surprising number of my emotional threads have been/are tugged at by chicken.
Yes, chicken.
Fried, when I was very young.
A bit later, BBQ.
Adulthood, roasted. (Specifically, spatchcocked.)
Present day, stock.
By now you may be thinking “Not So Secret Agent Sally, where is this headed?”
Well dear reader, today’s newsletter is a deviation from poutine routine programming.
I find that sometimes the people most important to us are the ones we don’t talk about as often as we probably should.
If you don’t want a window into what is happening in my life in real time, I will not be offended if you skip today’s post. I have to admit that I’m nervous about what I am about to share. But I’ve thought a lot about what may unfold over the coming months and how much community means to me. I am not someone who can live one life IRL and another online without connecting the two.
Life can throw some serious lemons at us, and this newsletter has become an outlet where I can, on occasion, take a bite and get sour.
No lemonade today.
My dad is dying. I mean, we all are, I know. But he is dying sooner than most. And sooner than any of us would like. On July 24th, 2024, he was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
Fast forward to today, and it is a true medical miracle that my dad is still alive. Up until recently he was in a progressive and groundbreaking clinical trial that has helped give him/us this past year together. It’s been a year full of travel, dinners, swims in his pond, and even the occasional mundane conversation where I find myself getting both annoyed by his usual antics and grateful that I continue to get to hear them.
I know. By now, you’re used to my mom coming up in the NSSA newsletter since she and I worked so closely together at The Ekus Group. Lisa Ekus commands every room she walks into.
And that is really saying something considering my dad never enters a room quietly.
Actually, many eons ago, my parents were both part of what was then called Lisa Ekus Public Relations (LEPRA for short). Lisa and Lou co-founded the first culinary media training program in the country. They worked with luminaries such as Emeril, Padma, and Julia.
My dad also made his individual mark in the culinary game. Among many other accolades, Lou Ekus has a shout out in Rachel Ray’s books and a cameo in the Charlie Trotter documentary. I know more than a few NSSA readers even worked with my dad at some point!
THE EARLY YEARS: FRIED CHICKEN
As a child, I had fabulous meals at home. But things changed once my parents divorced. As I was once a full-time solo adult responsible for coordinating how to feed Maybelline, I have come to deeply—and I mean deeply—feel for my parents now, understanding what they must have faced raising two young girls while maintaining their careers.
The juggle is REAL.
Post divorce, the apartment my dad moved to was a shell. Physically and emotionally. I distinctly remember packing up items for “my room at my dad’s” and choosing all my least favorite items so my “real room” back at my mom’s could stay intact. In hindsight, bringing my stiff backup pillow, dry old sheets, discarded toys, and stuffed animal rejects was a sure-fire way to fast track the confused and devastated pit in my stomach that grew when my parents were arguing their way through a divorce.
Dinner at my dad’s was often take-out from our local fried chicken joint. Our area didn’t have a lot of chain restaurants, so no KFC. The chicken was still in a bucket though. And it still came with mashed potatoes, gravy, and slaw.
Closing my eyes, I can feel the thick, flour-laden sauce sticking to the roof of my mouth. I can taste each crispy, oily, hot bite of crispy chicken skin as it meets my tween angst, sadness, and supreme disappointment and confusion in my parents’ choices.
Fried chicken nights must have been both affordable and a quick way to get dinner on the table. My sister and I were young. I totally understand why my dad chose this route. Fast forward to now: I struggle every day to figure out what to cook for Maybs. My workday ends (kind of/not really) when I pick her up, and it’s a workday where I almost never have time to shop, prep, or cook.
So yeah, I had no concept of what it takes to run a household, raise a kid, work a full day, and navigate an emotional roller coaster of personal upheaval. Now I do.
Dad, I love you.
TWEEN ANGST: THE BBQ YEARS
When my dad finally moved into the house he still lives in today, we swapped fried chicken for grilled chicken thighs with homemade BBQ sauce.
Looking back, I can now admit there was a direct correlation between how much I craved consistency at home and the insatiable hunger I had for those grilled thighs and his sauce. I didn’t want to admit the hunger for either, but I couldn’t get enough.
PapaLu’s BBQ chicken thighs were quick enough to cook off at the end of the workday, but the sauce took planning. It took care and attention. Settling into our new home meant my dad was also settling into a new normal. Tinkering with a sauce recipe to find the right balance somehow felt more feasible in a house where he owned the stove. And his time.
Eventually, he found the perfect ratio. I wish I could say this coincided with me finding the perfect way to feel at home in two places.
I will spare you from details of the years of my teenage attitude where we fought and said things we both regret. I’ll leave out the saga of being an absolute brat/ass to my stepmom, who never deserved any bit of it.
Dad, Leslie, I am sorry. I love you.
I came to crave grilled chicken thigh nights. The crispy bits on the end of each thigh would sear up just right. The slather of his tangy homemade sauce would stick to my heart.
My dad is a dreamer who has lived many lives. Growing up, I was often frustrated by his many “crazy ideas.” As an adult, I am deeply grateful for the wonder his wild ambition has modeled for me throughout my life.
I grew up floating in his hot air balloon and geocache hunting for treasure in the woods. I grew up with a magician, The Great Loudini, dazzling me and my friends at my birthday parties, and with fish tanks bigger than my bathtub that were filled with the most stunning creatures I have seen to this day. Yes, all of it, really.
It turned out my dad always had a dream of opening his own BBQ restaurant, and he happened to know his way around live fire. In 2004, one of my dad’s bigger dreams, Holy Smokes BBQ and Whole Hog House, became a reality.
The sauce I cherished was now spread across the lips and napkins of the public. Housed in a renovated church, this restaurant became my dad and stepmom’s sanctuary. Though I was away at college, I knew what a special place it was and would eat there every chance I could when I came home. The stained glass windows, weekly music nights, hot slabs of baby back ribs, twice cooked fries (you MUST double fry!), and generous veggie plates were the talk of the town for miles around.
ADULTHOOD: ROASTED
Sadly, in 2007 the beloved dream-restaurant-turned-reality, burned down. My dad and stepmom’s world shifted. As they grieved their tremendous loss alongside our local community, they turned to the comforting pleasures of a simple roast chicken.
Maybe the grind of running a restaurant seeped into home life, but dinners at Dad’s got fairly predictable.
“I’m just going to cook up a couple of roast chickens and keep it simple,” my dad would say whenever we asked what we were having during our upcoming visit to their house. The menu didn’t vary all that much, which my sister and I were totally fine with. We never balked (wait, was that an unintentional chicken joke?!). We adore roast chicken.
These days, Amelia and I both have our own routines for cooking this simple and predictable pleasure at home. She, with her perfectly seasoned cast iron. Mine, spatchcock style. Something about the crispy chicken skin that we pull out of our respective ovens feels like, at least for me, an act of caregiving for my younger self.
That smell, smokey, nourishing, and nurturing, instantly connects me to my dad.
Dad, I love you. So much.
This is what food and cooking is all about. A dish that takes on the shape of the hands cooking it, and of those that came before.
Nowadays most dinners at dad’s are prepared by someone else. Not because he can’t cook, but because the man who once had food at the center of his life has other things on his plate right now.
He is busy playing chicken with cancer.
PART TWO, dated post death:
Okay, full disclosure my dad didn’t think the ending of the essay was actually the end. His feedback was that it needed another beat. Is that why I never published it? No. I didn’t publish it because his decline happened so rapidly that my focus was on driving to his house each day to sit by his chair and be, just be. Near him. And with my family.
I am not going to dwell on how shitty that last line about playing chicken with cancer is. I wrote it thinking we would have plenty of time together and I could still workshop a kitschy and sarcastic ending using a play on words about life, death, and chicken.
Louis Ekus died on September 28th, 2025.
PRESENT DAY: TRASH STOCK
Both my sister and I are broth fanatics, and have been this way since we each settled into spaces with our own kitchens. We prioritize sipping broth throughout our busy workdays, our respective stoves sending aromatic wafts into the air that tease us out of our offices in between meetings and calls.
So much so that if you open either of our freezers you will find any number of bags with various bits of food trash in them.
Odd bits of vegetables? Yes.
Herb stems? Of course.
Bones from a variety of meals at home? You betcha.
Bones from dining out brought home for trash stock? Though perhaps one could argue overkill, also yes.
Like I said, both my sister and I are broth fanatics.
We seek out piping hot cups every chance we get. And while sometimes we get precious about stock vs broth, or the perfect way to clarify for liquid clarity, mostly we just go full throttle on not giving a f*ck. All that matters is having a comforting pot of trash stock ready and available for drinking at all times.
There is wonder to be discovered in watching the ends of things transform into something new.
I have always found it fascinating that a simple roast chicken leaves a wake of possibilities. Usually though, I am a bit too quick to skip the appreciation for the first meal it provides, preferring to settle into the seemingly endless comfort in broth iterations for days.
During the final weeks of my dad’s life, our stepbrother and Holy Smokes chef, Seth, kept an enormous pot of broth at the ready for us all. Time began to warp. The speed at which our dad declined was matched only by the excruciatingly slow pace of our disbelief. We watched death arrive with medication timers, hospice visits, and shallow breathing. As one of life’s most dreadful moments unfolded, the broth was our constant.
The steam from the mug freed the tears I couldn’t always bring myself to shed.
Now as I write, I sit trying to grapple knowing that half of this piece was created during a time when I sipped broth at dad’s house by his side, and the other half while I simmer my own, alone finishing this newsletter.
There will be no other piece of writing ever in my life that is crafted within this specific evolution. I am comforted by the fact that my dad would get such a kick out of how bizarre and unique it is to turn back to this essay.
There is wonder to be discovered in watching the ends of things transform into something new.
In fact, the original Part One has become a final gift. What was it like for him to listen to that as he sat in his chair knowing his body was winding down?
When I re-read it, today, on the first Father’s Day without my dad earthside, I am immediately transported back to his hands crossed in his lap as he soaked in every word of his daughter’s work. I held that day’s mug and let the steam hit my face. We both let tears well up in our eyes, as I read the words “Dad, I love you.”
~Sally~
For those looking to read more about my dad, his non traditional obituary here offers even more insight into his wonderous life. And for those who have asked, here is a way to throw a few chicken bones towards at world without pancreatic cancer.
A tremendous and loving remembrance, Sally. It took me back to the very early days when your mother and father came down to Key West. It was there in that little kitchen on Simonton Street that I got my first Media training by the two of them. Tremendous guides into a vast world I was about to enter. And when you mentioned the hot air balloon and the fish tanks I was transported to your home in Hatfield and the party for your mom's birthday. Oh what a party! Your grandfather Doc made the most epic french fries ever. I wrote about those for my radio show in fact. What a beautiful family what a beautiful memory. Keep sipping. Keep writing these stories too. 💙🌈
I am celebrating my first Father’s Day today without my Dad who died at 97 on December 21 2025. Being a child of divorce myself - my parent’s split when I was five - your story spoke to me, your feeling of grief, loss and regret beautifully expressed and communicated. I worked with your parents many years when they were still married. I was a very green food stylist in my late twenties, and spent a long day in a New York television studio with your father making a series of promotional videos. I remember what a strong life force he had and the visionary he was in the early days of “food” television.
Thank you for be brave enough to share your beautiful writing. It has made me feel less alone while processing my own grief today.