Making Chicken Little Go a Long Way

Just by virtue of being an @MisfitsMarket fan—customer or not—you’re interested in high quality food, reasonable prices, and minimizing waste.  For instance, I recently found myself googling “fennel frond recipes” just to see if I could use those wavy green things somehow instead of composting them immediately.  It turns out, they make a great pesto.  This experience was eye opening for me, because I caught myself wasting by habit, not intentionally.  Where else might I be wasting without thinking?   

My thoughts turned to meat.  What if we took that same approach with meat? 

I came up with 2 questions to ask myself:

1) Are we eating reasonable portions of meat, or just eating all the meat that I cooked? And

2) What are we wasting just because we don’t know/can’t be bothered to use it well?  

In brief, how can we use up every bit of goodness in, for instance, a chicken?  

The approach: Instead of serving the whole bird all at once, cook your meat head of time and serve it pre-portioned in several meals.  Pair this with larger portions of veggies and a starch, and no one will starve.  Not even close. You might even feel better because you’re starting to eat normal portions of meat.  

If that sounds overwhelming, you’re in the right place.  These next blog posts are for YOU:

-How to roast a chicken

-How to make stock from the chicken bones and other leftover parts

-How to making chicken soup with the stock

To give you an idea of your options in general, here’s how you can use up a whole chicken wisely:   

Step 1: Roast your chicken, making sure you keep all those juices. That stuff is gold.  Let it cool down. 

Step 2: De-bone your chicken with your hands. Divide the meat and the grossness. Pick all the meat off and put it aside.   

Step 3: Put all the pan juices and scraps—skin, bones, the neck, gross things you would never eat—in a labeled Ziplock bag and freeze.  This will become stock. 

Step 4: Take your chicken meat and divide it into at least 6 portions.  Why 6?  I want to make sure this family of 2 gets three full meals out of the meat of this chicken.  If you can get 7 or 8 portions (or more!), great.  Depending on your preference, you can combine white and dark meat or keep them separate.  I tend to mix them to distribute the fattier (and therefore tastier) pieces in all dishes.  If you love the math side of budgeting, figure out how much you are spending per portion of meat.  Those numbers will bring you great joy.

Step 5: Plan out how you are going to use your chicken in each meal.  Here are a couple examples: 

Meal 1: Chicken salad (on a salad or in a sandwich)Meal 1: Pasta Alfredo with chicken

Meal 2: Sautéed veggies over potatoes or noodles, topped with chickenMeal 2: Stir-fry with chicken

Meal 3: Chicken TacosMeal 3: Chicken pot pie

Any leftovers: Soup.Any leftovers: on a salad

If you have a bigger family: adapt these principles to your eating needs.  Maybe cook 2 chickens at once, and double everything.  Maybe 1 small chicken is now enough to feed everyone once as a part of a meal and not the centerpiece.  You’re going to LOVE what this approach does for your food budget. 

Try it!  Don’t decide to do this forevermore; just try it once.  Then, when you’re ready, try again.  Eventually, using the WHOLE chicken will become cooking muscle memory.