It’s just a coincidence that Colleen Jensen Cook, LCSW, used to live on a street called Chicken Dinner Road in Idaho. When she moved into the house her parents built there during high school, people often thought she was joking when she shared her address. Pranksters also stole the sign frequently, delighted, perhaps, by its absurdity.
“I even researched how the street got its name for a speech I did in college,” she said.
(Cook discovered that the road was given its tongue-in-cheek moniker after a woman who lived on what was then Lane 12, Laura Lamb, served the governor a fried chicken dinner and convinced him to help pave the street. Vandals painted Lamb’s Chicken Dinner Avenue on the freshly oiled road when it was completed, and the name stuck.)
But, as noted, Cook’s time living on and researching Chicken Dinner Road is purely coincidental to the fact that she now has three chickens as pets. Boosty, Crystal, and Monarch will never be dinner — although the hens’ eggs have been used to make French toast casserole for PLNU social work students!
Cook came to own chickens because of her daughter, Aria, not her old address. Cook said Aria is an animal lover and an artistic soul. After visiting family in Oregon who owned chickens, Aria became intrigued with the idea of adopting her own poultry pets.
Cook’s husband, Roscoe (01), a PLNU engineering physics alum, worked with Aria to build a coop in their Point Loma backyard, which borders a canyon. Colleen, Roscoe, Aria, and her brother, Bowen, have raised chickens as a family ever since.
“They’re just really fun and silly,” Cook said. “Especially during COVID, when things were tough, I would go and let them out and just watch them. It was good mental health for me.”
At times, the coop has housed as many as eight or nine birds, but the family currently has three chickens. Cook enjoys feeding them leftover vegetables that might have otherwise gone to waste and listening to their pleasant sounds.
