Roasted Chicken and Root Vegetables

The first year after Abra was born we ate a lot of rotisseries chickens from the market’s deli. Grocery shopping with an infant in tow was a perilous, anxiety-filled experience those first few months. The windows of time between nursing and napping and crying were so brief that it never seemed like a good time to go, and it often took me most of my day to screw up the courage to actually get in the car and drive to the store. Once there, I struggled with whether I should place her in the cart in her car seat or strap her to my person in a carrier. The former meant that she filled the entire basket, causing me to pile groceries all around her such that she nested in a cocoon of canned beans, broccoli, and spaghetti. The latter amounted to me wrestling her into the carrier all by myself in the parking lot, appearing so inept that bystanders often stopped to ask, “Do you need help?,” the punch line of a bad joke (“How many people does it take to wrangle a floppy-headed infant into a carrier?”).