Worth it?

My children are early risers, like so early we have a rule that you are not allowed to leave the bed before 6am or disturb your parents before 7am.

It is actually sort of nice on school days. They get up, get dressed and occupy themselves with books or the Wii or playing with the action figures until we get up at 6:40 and make breakfast. I currently do not have the hassle of having to get up even earlier to wake them & get them dressed etc. Because of their early rising I can sleep in a bit.

But.

They catch the bus at 7:20am and there I am – awake for the day and it’s too early to many things, like make the assorted phone calls usually I need to make or go to the bank, pay the electric bill, etc. I drag out my morning with a second cup of coffee and blog reading but still, I’m ready to get on with the day by 8:15. So I head to the gym & spend an hour or so working out. This generally puts me close to 10am. I  stop by the grocery store in the same plaza to pick up whatever things I need and it often occurs to me that I would love to get a rotisserie chicken for dinner. Serve it with some hummus & other various Mediterranean dips plus a fruit & veggie tray & have a nice quick serve yourself dinner, plus lunch & then soup a couple days later.

But.

Rotisserie chicken is not available until 11am. And it is impossible to kill an hour in the Safeway. It would different if it was Wegmans, but then I’d probably want something other than rotisserie chicken

Yesterday, as a result of leaving a little later, adding 10 minutes to my cardio workout and dropping books off at the library I arrived at the Safeway at very late time of 10:45. They were having a sale on wine. All wine 20% off, plus if you buy six bottles you get another 10% off. This meant I could buy wine in the $9-11 range instead of the $6-9 range and it could easily take me 15 minutes to decide on 6 bottles of upmarket wine, especially since a couple of them give me headaches and I don’t always recall which ones. That put rotisserie chicken within my grasp.

While I was contemplating my wine selection I ran into a friend who was doing the same while waiting for her prescription to be filled. I said I was waiting for a rotisserie chicken to be cooked. She is frugal (she was looking at the $6-9 wine even though there was a sale) and could not believe I wouldn’t just buy a whole chicken (they are only $3.99) and roast it myself. It’s easy to roast a chicken! Heck you can even put it in a crock pot when you get home & it’ll be ready for dinner!(that is more of a steamed chicken than a roasted one IMO, crock pots don’t get hot enough to roast). Why spend all that money on something you can do yourself?

I get that. I crochet things rather than buy them. My husband does most of the electrical & plumbing in our house rather than pay someone. I just don’t like roasting whole chickens. Yes it’s easy, so easy  a cave man did do it (or some sort of fowl anyway) But I don’t want to do it. I prefer not to cook bone in meats except on the grill. I don’t like roasting whole fowl with their different white & dark meat temperatures. You will never eat a whole turkey at Thanksgiving at my house. I buy breast only.

She didn’t buy this argument. (maybe I should have  offered 20% off on it). Save the money. Roast the chicken. It’s just reckless spending otherwise.

A rotisserie chicken costs $6.99. It is slightly larger than the $3.99 raw whole chicken, by about a pound, and it comes injected with flavor (I like the rosemary garlic). I’d have to buy garlic & fresh rosemary (which I have no other immediate use for & cannot buy in bulk so much of it would go to waste), plus the slightly larger chicken so probably we’re looking at $5.50 to roast a comparable chicken. Then there is the time to prep the chicken and check on the chicken while it cooks. And the stress of wondering if you will dry out the breast meat while getting the leg meat cooked or if you are risking salmonella to get juicy breast meat. Did the temperature probe just hit bone or is that gristle? It is worth my time, effort & stress? For a $1.49 difference? I don’t think so.

Rotisserie chicken. Because I am WORTH it.

Plus a discounted $10 bottle of Australian shiraz.

They were delicious, by the way.