Started the day at dark o’clock for an early appointment and ended up ordering Costco delivery this afternoon. Got one of their rotisserie chickens, was cutting it up, add a little bok choy, a little tamarind, a sample bite of the slightly overcooked breast…

And only then I found that the underside of the bird was not just undercooked, it was straight-out raw. Dang. They had problems with that years ago and the health department gave that a hard no and it was supposedly long since fixed. I threw it all in the oven and cooked it a good one.

We were sitting down to dinner; Richard took the turn to say the prayer over the food.

We were about to dish it out when suddenly he was going, Wait. We shouldn’t.

I said, I got it completely cooked and it wasn’t that long after it arrived–and then went, Wait. It was nearly three hours, and even if it spent that time in the fridge the cooked part was still warm when I pulled it out.

He pointed out, We have no way to know how long it sat out on their end on top of that. You cannot cook out what could grow from raw meat left out for hours.

The toxins the salmonella and campylobacter produce as they grow, helped by warmth that wasn’t enough to cook it there. He was right.

The chicken was contained in a ziplock, the ziplock went in the trash, the trash went outside, and the hands got washed at every step.