Chicken

Makes 4 servings 1. Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Place 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and 1 tablespoon of the butter with the garlic in a small saucepan. Heat over low heat until the butter is melted. Cook for about a minute more until the garlic is fragrant, then remove from the heat. 2. Wash the chicken under cold water and pat dry with paper towels. Brush the chicken with the garlic mixture. Season each chicken leg with one-fourth teaspoon salt and allow to stand at room temperature while you prepare the lemons and artichokes for frying.

All right, let's get the laughing out of the way first. That would seem the smartest thing to do. Because laughing is undoubtedly going to be your first reaction when you read that Randall E. Wise wants to put contact lenses on all the world's chickens. That's right, contact lenses. Tinted fire-engine red, to be specific. On chickens. Now, go on . . . cackle. But wait a minute - don't cackle too long, and don't do it too loudly. Don't misunderstand - Randy Wise has certainly got a sense of humor about the idea, as anyone who has been a victim of Johnny Carson's monologue must have.

Ted Turner wants Rupert Murdoch, preferably in a boxing ring, in front of a national pay-per-view audience. It's only a Turner pipe dream, a half-baked challenge that won't come off until Don King donates all his future purses to charity. This is the beauty of Ted Turner, the multimillionaire media mogul, Atlanta sports-team owner who speaks without thinking, talks without worrying where the verbal shrapnel may fly. Turner says the line between genius and madness is a thin one. He walked that high wire expertly yesterday in front of the Associated Press Sports Editors, an organization of sports editors from around the country.

You may recall that I lectured you in my commencement-speech column to slow down and savor the moments of your life, so I thought you should know I'm doing nothing like that. I flunked savoring. I know it's the drowsy dog days of summer and I'm supposed to enjoy sitting around watching the tomatoes ripen and noticing the particular hue of the sunlight as it hits the leafy trees and blah blah blah. Summer sounds like literary fiction, but I write books with car chases. In other words, I got a new summer project.

As much as 90 to 100 percent of chicken released by various processing plants during some periods might be tainted with salmonella bacteria, several government poultry inspectors say in a complaint released by a consumer group. In addition, an internal department audit found that when the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service does detect contaminated food, it is ineffective in alerting the public about recalls. Consumers have become ill after eating these products - including chicken - the audit said.

Help is on the way for the beleaguered savings and loan industry. Riding to the rescue are . . . Chicken Little, Henny Penny and Turkey Lurkey? Strange but true. That lovable gang of misguided alarmists has been enlisted by Huntingdon Valley Federal Savings & Loan Association to make a point. Namely, that not every S&L is about to fall out of the sky. Many S&Ls are quite healthy, in fact, and eager to spread the word to customers. "We wanted to acknowledge that, yes, there is a problem among many S&Ls," said Herbert N. Read Jr., advertising and marketing director at Huntingdon Valley.

When my husband, David, and I lived in New York City, like most New Yorkers we picked out our favorite Chinese take-out restaurant. Once we had deemed that the tiniest and stuffiest takeout in our neighborhood was also the one with the best General Tso's chicken (No. 24, all white meat!), we became two of the many regulars of a true wok-king wizard, a man from Hong Kong whose mercilessly permed hair added half a foot to his tiny stature. I never knew his real name. He argued that since we would not be able to pronounce it, it mattered not what we called him. So we agreed upon Mr. Afro-Perm, or AP for short.

Man's first kitchen was the great outdoors, and his first cooking utensil was probably the forerunner of today's rotisserie. Skewer some meat, turn it over a fire, and behold: dinner. The food would be evenly cooked, highly flavorful and self-basted, with its fat melted away and its juices sealed in. Some things have not really changed that much, a point worth remembering as the nation's chicken manufacturers argue in a spate of new advertising the question of whose chicken is leaner.

Although she's busy filming the successful UPN sitcom "Malcolm & Eddie," Karen Malina White always manages to find the time to take care of her body. "I go to body-sculpting classes in L.A.," the South Philly-born actress said. "It mostly consists of aerobics, cardio work and weightlifting. We also do a lot of sit-ups and leg squats. " White attends classes four days a week taught by a fitness trainer who goes by the name of Dove. Pauletta Washington, the wife of Hollywood's Denzel, and actress Jennifer Lewis are among the women who kick out $12 a day for one of Dove's morning workouts.

Consumers can expect to pay higher prices for tomatoes and chicken in the coming weeks because this month's record-breaking heat and humidity have destroyed crops and flocks. "I think that it would be safe to say consumers will be paying more for tomatoes," said Donald Persing, chief of market news and cooperative service for the New Jersey Department of Agriculture. On Friday, Persing said, the wholesale price for a 25-pound box of large tomatoes ranged from $8.50 to $20.40 at the Swedesboro Produce Auction in Gloucester County.