table talk / By Bob Doran

Roasting chicken and a Taste

(March 22, 2007)  While shopping at Wildberries not long ago, I saw Phil Ricord staring, lost in thought, in the general direction of the deli section, aka Wildplatters Café. If you shop at the store, or listen to the radio or watch TV, I don’t have to explain who Phil is - in short, he owns Wildberries. In the interest of full disclosure I should also mention that I’ve known Phil for years, I guess since he married his wife Jeannie, who I’ve known for several decades. I also worked for Phil briefly: I was hired as assistant manager of Wildplatters at its inception, an exciting job that I did not keep too long for reasons I won’t go into here.

I interrupted Phil’s reverie to ask what he was looking at. “My new toy,” he replied. I had actually checked out the recent addition to the café when I’d arrived at the store: a lovely chicken rotisserie that had been fired up for the first time that very day. I’d come looking for something for dinner and would have bought one of the roast chickens, if they were ready.

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As I told Phil, rotisserie roasted chicken has become a regular thing for our family, at least on days when I make the drive to Costco. They’re phenomenally cheap, ready to eat immediately, and in our household, with just two of us (sometimes three), one chicken will make for a series of meals.

I’ll slice off part of a breast for me, a leg or thigh for Amy, maybe zap a potato in the micro and whip up a little salad for a first dinner, then pick the rest of the meat and use it for a variety of dishes. It might be shredded and sprinkled with cumin for a taco at lunch, or it could become one component in a homemade version of Chinese chicken salad. I might roughly cube some to use as part of a pasta dish (along with whatever else happens to be in the fridge). Or, as in a recent dinner, add it to half a jar of Thai green curry sauce (purchased on my last Trader Joe’s run) along with a few quickly sautéed mushrooms and a handful of leftover green beans to make a spicy dish served over a portion of rice that lingered from some Chinese takeout meal.

Phil was still figuring out what kind of chicken he’d use and how much he might charge. I don’t think he’d ever bought a Costco chicken - he seemed genuinely surprised when I told him they only cost around $5. I can’t say it was that conversation, but he’s decided to offer two tiers of roast chicken, conventional and free range, with the more natural chicks priced a bit higher.

On a recent Monday around noon, Terrdog Devine was just about done roasting the day’s batch of upper tier “Rocky” brand chickens, free range, hormone- and antibiotic-free birds, “sustainably farmed” in Petaluma according to the company website, but not certified organic.

As Devine pierced a bird’s thigh with a thermometer looking for 175 degrees, and the juices flowed, you could see that the roasting kept the meat totally moist. She says she doesn’t do much to the birds before cooking them, just sprinkles them with salt and pepper or Carl’s All Purpose Seasoning, a spice mix originally made by a Tennessee hunter for use on venison.

By dinnertime, she will have roasted a second batch using Foster Farms chickens, presumably grown in a more restrictive and relatively less sustainable manner. I can actually guess how the poor animals lived and died, but I’d rather not think about it since that’s the kind of chicken this frugal consumer generally buys.

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