In the last month chicken has been that loss leader on sale most weeks for 99 cents at least one of our supermarkets. So I have been buying multiple packages every week. Now yes my freezer is very full of chicken and I know for sure my family is going to get very sick of chicken very quickly so I have to come up with multiple ways to use it up. But my goal is to get as many meals out of one package as I possibly can.
So lets start with a family package of chicken thighs. Now this package was approximately 5 pounds worth of thighs. So that would cost about $5, which is what we will use for easy math purposes. Now you could simply split that package in half and make two meals for $2.50 per meal, not bad but we can do better.
I started out by boiling the thighs, half a package at a time, just to make it more manageable. Once the first batch was done, I DID NOT dump out the water that it had been boiling in, just set it aside. I then shredded the chicken into a bowl. I took the skin and the bones, placed them back into the pot with the boiled water, added some more water and preceded to low heat boil them. This was the beginning of a chicken stock broth.
With that shredded chicken I added homemade BBQ sauce (recipe will follow in another post), I had a tube of Artisan Pizza Crust, which I happen to have gotten on clearance in the grocery and thrown into the freezer for $1 when it was all said and done. I also had several blocks of various kinds of cheese in the freezer that I had been accumulating over the previous weeks from various sales and clearances. From those ingredients I made Homemade BBQ Chicken Pizza with Mozzarella cheese. That entire meal cost less than $5 total and only about 1 hour of my time.
By this time the chicken stock had been boiling for a while, I strained out the bones, skin etc that was cooking and placed the broth into a bowl in the fridge to cool down, once it was cooled I poured it into zip lock style bags to go into the freezer for future meals.
Now I again placed the remaining chicken into the pot and began the process again. With the shredded chicken this time I wanted to make BBQ Chicken sandwiches. Using the remaining BBQ Sauce, I mixed the chicken in to it, at this point I realized that I did not have any buns to put the sandwiches on. I did not want to drive somewhere-the closet store is 15 minutes away, I know that wasn’t far but it was 15 minutes each way and the time spent in the store I was looking at close to 45 minutes to just go and get rolls. So I pulled out the cookbook and found I had all the necessary ingredients to make homemade buns.
So I made the buns, while they were cooking, I added the chicken into the oven so that everything was cooked at once, not wasting the propane to heat and then later reheat the oven. I actually made more rolls than I needed for this meal and they too were placed into zip lock style bags, then off to the freezer with them.
So if we tally this day up. I spent $5 on chicken and I got 2 meals and 2-½ gallons of chicken stock. Basically if you were to buy that amount of stock in the store with all the extra sodium and things in it you are looking at about $3 each for a total of $6, a BBQ chicken pizza normally costs about $10, shredded BBQ chicken sandwich meat is often about $4 a container. So that should have cost me $28-including the BBQ sauce, cheese and rolls. I made all of it for less than $10 once you count the price of the ingredients for the rolls, cheese, BBQ sauce ingredients. Not a bad way to make your dollar stretch. Yes it did require some time and effort on my part in the kitchen but in the process I gave my family a good healthy meal, taught my daughter a few new tricks in the kitchen and felt really good about myself.
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