Burt Likko pointed me to a really interesting article on rotisserie chickens and why they’re so relatively inexpensive:

Though supermarkets are loath to admit as much, likely for fear of turning off the squeamish, the former CEO of Trader Joe’s cheerfully confirmed in a recent interview that meat and produce are recycled into prepared foods. And the vendor of one of the leading commercial rotisserie ovens offers, as a complement to its wares, “culinary support” that, among other things, aims to “develop programs to minimize food shrinkage and waste” and “improve production planning to optimize the amount of fresh food that is available during both peak and down times.”

Rotisserie chickens aren’t even the end of the line. When unsold, fresh meats, fruits and veggies that have passed their sell-by points can be “cooked up for in-store deli and salad counters before they spoil,” per no less a source than a consultant to the supermarket industry.

We’ve become big fans. I bring home one more than half of the time I go to Walmart, in part because theirs are better than the other place I shop at. It provides for at least a couple of meals, just you can tear it up and put it in other things to add a little more meat. My preferred brands of turkey chili, for example, are pretty light on the meat. Also, soup. You can put some in beans and make a pretty good little contraption.

Even better than the rotisserie chicken is the rotisserie turkey breast. That’s straight meat with a whole lot of different things you can do with it. In addition to breaking my mouth and bowels, my recent illness broke my heart. I had just purchased a whole lot of turkey breast before I got sick. But I couldn’t eat it (or anything). I was afraid that it would go bad.

My favorite thing to do with the turkey is to cut it in slices and make the perfect sandwich. The perfect sandwich, to my mind, is a turkey, cheddar, and mayo sandwich on white bread. I have no idea why I like it so much, but it’s the perfect combination of everything. The tastes just bounce off one another in yummy goodness. And I’m not much of a sandwich person. It was one of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, even when I moved on from my distaste of eating anything, I still couldn’t eat mayo. Which meant that I had to do something else with the turkey. Clancy went shopping and got some southwestern mustard, which is a substitute. But instead of yummy perfection, it tasted like… turkey, cheddar, bread, and southwestern mustard. The magic was gone.