Congress may be absent this week, but Restaurant Associates’ devoted personnel remain — tirelessly seeding staff meals with new and exciting mystery ingredients.  

Last week there was the vanishing catfish sliders conundrum. Earlier this month, someone fished a garden dweller out of their soup. And then there was that whole, mind-bending “vegetarian ” cod thing.  

Today, at least, the offensive material was properly identified.  

Our poor lunch-deprived tipster plucked this bony mass from the heart of the chicken etouffee served in the Longworth Cafeteria. “I’m learning not to go downstairs and order things that look opaque,” the startled diner told HOH. The patron was baffled by discovering what was presumed to be a chicken spine (looks more like a neck bone, to us), but declined to pester the harried kitchen crew about it.  

“What are they going to do? It was just $7,” the tipster, who wound up dumping everything into the trash and declaring lunch a total loss, said of the unsettling experience.  

While many modern recipes call for boneless , skinless pieces of bird to begin with, some chefs are still cool with using every part of the animal to START the mouthwatering Creole brew.  

Sadly, it seems that in their rush to sate the congressional workforce, RA failed to heed one critical step.  

“Remove the chicken pieces from pot to a cutting board and shred the meat. Discard the bones and return the meat to the pot,” Food Network star Tyler Florence expounds in his take on the iconic dish.