My Husband and I have been trying to keep food costs relatively low as well as getting the most bang for our buck and being able to experiment a little in the kitchen. I've talked about how much we love to make an easy dinner put of a pack of chicken wings or thighs, but I have recently discovered how much fun it is to cook a whole chicken. You can get many great meals out of it, up to five (or more!) depending on the size of the bird, not to mention some rich chicken stock to last for many more meals.
We purchased a medium sized bird from one of our local farms. A little pricey, but the quality is better than a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's chicken, although they can be good deals as well. Pastured chicken is much more flavorful and can even be slightly gamey. I like to cook it for a long time so that it has a fall off the bone texture. That takes about an hour and a half at 375 degrees. We cover it with lots of spices; sea salt, black pepper, thyme, oregano, parsley, cayenne...just to name a few. We love the skin when it is crispy and very flavorful.
We got 4 full dinners out of this one little bird. We could have been more stingy and gotten more out of it, or we could have filled up a little more at once and gotten less. Regardless, we had very good eating for almost a whole week...
The first two nights, we typically get to enjoy full pieces on the bone. Afterwards we make stews or sautes out of the meat we can pick off. And by the last night, I bake whatever is left of the bird at 350 again for 20 minutes or so and we pick every last bit we can off. And as always, we save every bone for stock making.
Dinner One:
Not sure what cut this is but it includes the wing and surrounding areas, served over veggies that were prepared in the slow cooker for two hours while the bird was cooking as well.
Dinner Two:
Thighs for each of us, served over sauteed rise and black beans (soaked and prepared in advance) with some frozen broccoli thrown in. Nice easy meal...
Dinner Three
White meat stew, we don't love the white meat so the easiest thing to do is to chop it up and slow cook it with some veggies so it gets really soft. We had some cabbage in there that complemented things nicely. And yes, those are jalapenos in there, we like things spicy around here. Also while not local, Whole Foods has been carrying a lot of organic hot peppers recently which I have never seen before and am super excited about. We also buy some local ones here, although I doubt they are organic.
Dinner Four:
Like I said, Picked whatever we could off the bones and made a saute with the leftover black beans and some frozen broccoli and peas. This was the end of the week and we were running out of fresh veggies. I keep frozen organic veggies on hand to supplement with in a pinch. There was actually a lot of meat left over and it was so tender and delicious from the long cooking. We probably could have stretched it into two meals or had it for lunch the next day.
And nourishing stock!
Not sure why it is so dark (I don't bother to filter it that well). I actually got a mason jar and a half and froze the whole one. I even had bones left over that couldn't fit in the slow cooker and I double stewed this round of bones and plan to use the weaker stock to cook rice and beans with. So even though the whole bird was more expensive, it really gave us a lot more nutrition than buying parts separately.
I should also mention that cooking the whole bird is the only time I have ever seen any visible gelatin form. I had never seen the clear big pieces, either in finished stock or as a by-product of cooking before. The bird ends up stewing a little in its own juices and when I take it out of the fridge the next day (I just store it in the glass bowl I cooked it in) it has a nice big layer of gelatine on the bottom which I take out and add to the bones for stock making. Maybe that is why the stock is so much more cloudy?
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