I spent most of yesterday just catching up on things. The last few weeks have been busy and one look in our refrigerator revealed that I was correct when I thought I couldn’t remember the last time I made a real trip to the grocery store and bought actual ingredients to cook a meal as opposed to Kind bars, wine, and Halloween candy.
So I made a lengthy list of things we needed, got some laundry started, composed several emails, paid our bills and then headed out to the pet store to buy Piper and Mabel’s fancy dog food and then to HEB to buy people food.
I always start in the produce section so I picked out all our berries, fruits and various vegetables and then headed over to the meat section because I need chicken for two of the recipes I wrote down as part of our “meal plan” this week. And I put “meal plan” in quotes because it’s more like a “best of meal intentions” than actual plan and the whole thing can go off the rails at any moment depending on our soccer practice schedule or the mention of “Do you just want to pick something up tonight?”
I believe I’ve mentioned in the past that I am a finicky chicken consumer. Frankly, chickens in their raw form gross me out. This could be largely due to the fact that chickens even in their living form are questionable at best. It’s just that sometimes it can be disconcerting to eat a chicken because the various parts you eat so closely resemble the parts when they’re still covered with feathers. A chicken leg absolutely looks like a chicken leg whereas you don’t ever eat a cow leg. I mean, maybe you do eat cow legs at your house but I don’t know your life.
All that to say, I will flat eat a fried chicken tender because it doesn’t look like anything other than a strip of crispy, fried goodness meant to be dipped in mashed potatoes and gravy. What I’m saying is that I prefer my food not to look like anything natural. Maybe someone could write that cookbook.
Anyway, I found my way to the raw chicken section of the meat market. Normally, I like to just buy a rotisserie chicken for most chicken dishes and I realize this contradicts what I just said about my food not looking natural because a rotisserie chicken truly looks like it could stand up and run off if it wanted to…maybe while wearing a hat. This is an indication that I’ve had nightmares about this exact scenario. But at least it’s already cooked which eliminates a lot of the slime factor. And just typing that sentence made me throw up in my mouth a little. Why did I opt for chicken recipes this week?
I stood there in the raw chicken section and looked over all my various choices. My absolute criteria are that it must be both boneless and skinless. And then a new addition to the raw chicken aisle caught my eye.
What on earth? Air Chilled Chicken?
What does that even mean? Are these chickens who formerly lived in an air-conditioned coop while eating their all natural vegetarian grain? Are they the same chickens who once hatched their eggs on farms with sunlit barns and porches and laid jumbo organic brown eggs?
Did they once look down on all their neighboring chickens with disdain because they knew those were just regular non-chilled chickens who ate grain that wasn’t all natural? Isn’t grain by the very definition all-natural? Would a rotisserie chicken wear a hat?
I have no idea.
But what I do know is that I am a sucker for something that sounds extra special. Especially when it comes to raw chicken. I automatically assumed that air-chilled chicken can only mean something good. And then I posted a picture of it on Instagram and someone said it means it sat out at room temperature harvesting all kinds of bacteria and that I had merely paid extra for diarrhea.
(I couldn’t be sorrier about the reference to diarrhea but I’m just repeating information. I have spent a lot of years trying to make this blog a diarrhea-free zone. Please don’t shoot the messenger.)
Other people said that air-chilled chicken is delicious and that it means you aren’t paying for the extra weight of chicken that’s been chilled in cold water. Basically, maybe it’s better to have chicken who’s sunbathed at the top of a chilly mountain rather than swam in an ice-cold creek.
All I know is I’ve spent approximately WAY TOO MANY of the last twenty-four hours thinking about chicken and how they live. And also decided that maybe I’ll just put crispy beef tacos back on my “meal plan” and leave chicken to people that are stronger emotionally than I am.