Culinary, Health, Social Commentary, Weird

Roasting Chicken

12 Comments

I didn’t realize it was such a rare phenomenon. I rarely buy boneless chicken, and we roast a whole one (or split and grill it) almost every week, and then make soup with the leftovers, and have been doing it for years.

I continue to wonder how much this will change peoples’ eating habits, now that so many have learned to cook. It may mean that the restaurant industry will never recover to pre-plague levels.

12 thoughts on “Roasting Chicken”

    1. That sounds crazy to me. Before the pandemic, I could regularly buy whole chicken, or even just breasts, for less than a dollar a pound at Ralph’s. Five bucks for a roaster that we’d get multiple meals out of.

      1. If got to agree with you Rand. Even boneless skinless breasts beat that price. We only get those for convenient stir fry or satay. Thighs are incredibly cost effective and they do extremely well on a charcoal grill. They’re almost impossible to overcook.

        A totally brainless set-it-and-forget-it meal can be had with bone-in breasts or a whole chicken plus rice in our Foodi clone. Yum.

        Chicken, then seasonal turkey, and then pork are all very cost effective. Beef has gone crazy recently and don’t get me started on fish.

      2. “Organically fed Range Chicken” pricing is what it sounds like. Not plastic wrapped chicken at Costco™…

  4. Indeed, stuck here in Calgary – many restaurants closed but the rest switched to take-out only and kept on going, very busy whenever we dropped by for pickup. We’ve been eating at home a lot more but were missing the social aspect of dining out.

    Now that things are opening up again, we’ve gone out a couple times and it was a pleasure. I don’t think the pandemic will drastically change the dining out habit, but it will likely create major turnover in the restaurants themselves due to the inability of many to survive.

  5. I’m always amazed meeting people who either can’t cook, or don’t know you can buy meat at a stage before it’s dismembered, deboned, wrapped in plastic and put through several freeze/thaw cycles just to make certain it’s inedible.

    Mot people don’t seem to know you can buy a whole pork shoulder and cut it up into roasts yourself (requires a hacksaw if you want to split the picnic). Or slice up a rib roast if you crave steak. I buy whole chickens (which I sometimes roast and sometimes cook poule au pot). Sometimes I buy packages of chicken thighs, bone in, skin on, so I can make gribenes. Seeing stores full of boneless, skinless, bloodless breasts makes me wonder what happened. Maybe that’s what they feed IT serfs that makes them so pale and flabby? And maybe the HR Princess types just east birdseed?

    (Confession: I buy packaged hot dogs because making them from scratch is way too much trouble…)

    1. William, the meat counters at our local grocery stores are set up not dissimilar from a butcher, and are most times more than willing to slice up a roast into steaks if you want them, for no additional charge and at the original whole-roast per-pound price. If it’s mid-day and you’re patient, they’ll even wrap them all separately for you, too.

      1. You have better grocery stores than I do. My local store doesn’t even cut the meat and put it in the packages, they just slap on the labels and put it out for sale. The nearest actual meat cutters (not to be confused with butchers) are Whole Foods and King’s Red & White, both over 50 miles away. Cutting up meat is not difficult and I don’t mind doing it. One issue I’ve run into is, while I can buy intact primal cuts of pork, primal cuts of beef are only sold as “cut up,” with a price high enough it’s comparable to retail. IOW, you can’t buy an intact side of beef.

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