Roast Chicken

I love oven roasting chickens on a rack in a small roasting pan with a little water in the bottom of the pan for easy cleaning and slightly faster cooking.  I started tonight’s chicken before a meeting, went to the meeting, chatted with others after the meeting, came home, turned the chicken over to brown the other side and had a delicious roast chicken with rice dinner.

After dinner, I deboned the chicken and have a pound of leftover chicken for sandwiches or microwave quesadillas.  

Back in the day, I used to make a list for grocery shopping.  Since the advent of customer loyalty card sales, now I typically buy whatever is one sale.  99¢/lb chickens are hard for me to resist.  For less than $6, we got a healthy dinner for two with leftover chicken. 

On a side note, I can’t help but think there is some sort of market distortion (subsidy?) going on to keep chicken sale prices under a dollar per pound.   It seems like that has been the same low price for the last ten years.  According to the BLS, chicken prices per pound went from 87¢ in 1993 to 104¢ in 2003 to 150¢ in 2013.  That does not seem likely.  Hard to imagine grocers selling meat in Bellevue for 33% less the US city average.  A couple other quick searches seemed even more unreliable such as Index Mundi having gas prices at 49¢/gallon in 1993.

Now that the summer weather has gone away, I love roasting meats in the oven in the cooler days for a hot dinner in a warm apartment. 

I am grateful for the incredible selection of foods at local grocers, great sale prices, Google search, weird number trivia, electricity, safe hot & cold running water, cheap salt, dish soap, tons of local meetings, plates and forks!