While in the Kitchen

As I was cooking dinner this evening, I pondered yet again why it is that, here on an island nation where seafood finds its way into everything, even chip flavoring, chicken constitutes a major part of our diet instead of fish. This quite naturally led to a mental reviewing of poultry's pros and cons:

Pros:
* Low in fat
* Incredibly versatile in its usage
* Hard to ruin (unlike pork chops... lousy pork chops)
* No guts or scales to worry about, just the occasional blood vessel
* My husband likes chicken
* I like chicken
* It's insanely cheap... cheaper than fish, which is kind of sad in a way...

Cons:
* Even we can get tired of chicken
* They insist on selling chicken breast with the skin, which means I have the pleasure of peeling it off AND washing off the connecting mucus before tossing it into the frying pan...

I suppose the pros outweigh the cons. I hear that chicken prices have risen in the U.S. recently. For once, it seems that living on an island has produced something cheaper than our homeland (although everything else around us like the air more than makes up for it). You really can't beat roughly 61 cents per 100 grams, which means $2.80 for a pound.

I also find it interesting that dark meat like the thigh is double the price of breast meat, showing the Asian preference to be opposite that of the average American.

Does this mean that every time I buy chicken at the market and sigh at the inevitable inclusion of skin, I unknowingly paint a big red sign on my back that screams "foreigner"? First of all, I'm buying the less popular chicken part, and secondly, why wouldn't I want the delicious skin to brown all crispy-like to delight the tastebuds of my family? Or liver to combine with it? Or the heart for that matter?

They come in packs of 8.

I think... I'll just quietly peel the skin off, thank you.