Attack of the giant poultry

The Thai-spiced salmon I made on Tuesday was pretty good. The only problem was getting salmon fillets small enough to match the recipe. The supermarket fish guy (who I don't think fulfilled his apprenticeship to become a full-fledged "fishmonger") cut the fillets too big to be individual sizes, but too small to be divided nicely.

This leads into the larger problem of gigantic meat products, also known as the Cheesecake Factory conundrum. When I was first getting into cooking, I did a lot of things with chicken breasts: chicken cordon bleu, feta and herb-stuffed chicken... things like that. But the breasts in the stores always were so huge that I'd have to overcook the outside to cook the inside. (This shouldn't have been a problem with salmon, as you can eat it raw, but I'm not so into the raw fish.)

They make them that big b/c I guess we're supposed to want that. Or, you can buy the "organic" meat, which is smaller and more expensive. So you have to pay more to get less, but what you get is a size that isn't just more in line with how much you're supposed to eat, but is better for cooking.

Also, CNN.com had an article yesterday about the meat industry using carbon dioxide to keep meet looking red longer. That doesn't have anything to do with giant meat, but it seems wrong, too. I'm not chemist (or biologist, or whatever it is that knows what this does... cowmonger?), but it seems to me that artificially masking nature's way of saying, "Meat bad," isn't good.