There are several recipes in this book for preparing a rotisserie chicken at home. If you have a rotisserie accessory for your outdoor grill, in the summer you can prepare rotisserie chicken outdoors without heating up the oven. Otherwise, the rotisserie recipes suggest how you can take a rotisserie chicken that you bring home from the supermarket, enhance it, and make it your own.

Keep a few things in mind when you buy an already-prepared rotisserie chicken, including:

• Choose chicken with a large, full breast; it will have more meat and is less likely to have dried out under a heat lamp or in a hot box at the store.

• As soon as you get the chicken home, remove the skin and pull the chicken from the bone; the meat is easier to separate from the bone while the chicken is warm.

• Shred or cube any excess chicken; refrigerate or freeze it in cupsize portions so that it's already measured for future use.

• Reheat the already cooked meat slowly and on low heat to avoid cooking the meat any further.

• Always taste the chicken before you add it so you can adjust the seasonings (especially salt) called for in the recipe accordingly.

• Once you find a good place to purchase rotisserie chickens, ask the clerk for the best times to buy them so you'll know when the store has the largest selection that hasn't been standing under the heat lamps for a long time.

Once the skin is removed, the average purchased rotisserie chicken will yield about 4 cups of shredded chicken. Typically that amounts to about 12 ounces of white meat and 8 ounces of dark meat. That's enough meat that you can reserve the white meat for another use. For recipes like Deluxe Potato Soup that call for other meat in addition to the chicken, only add the dark meat.