Roasting a whole chicken is easy to do and it provides the foundation for four meals for four people: an amazing bargain!
When I was young, at least once a week we’d sit down to dinner and one of us kids would exclaim, “Awe, Mom! Chicken again?” Mom cooked a lot of chicken, I think, because chicken was—and still is—an inexpensive source of (delicious) protein.
Open your chicken package in the sink and try to contain fluids there—nearly 50% of all commercially packaged chicken contains bacteria that can make you very sick (cooking kills the bacteria). A whole chicken is likely to include a paper envelope holding such body parts as liver, heart, gizzard, and neck. If you don’t spot it easily, probe the body cavities (one at each end) and remove the packet.From time-to-time you can find whole chickens on sale for as little as $.79 per pound, and more typically from $.99 to $1.49 per pound. A five-to-six pound chicken at any of those prices is an amazing bargain; it can become the centerpiece of at least four meals for a family of four.
Chicken for 16
I prepare one chicken for four meals by roasting it. This may be the easiest way to cook chicken:
Dust a whole five-to-six-pound bird with poultry seasoning, onion powder, and pepper, and put it in the oven at 350 degrees. After 90 minutes, jam a meat thermometer into a breast so the thermometer doesn’t touch a bone. If the thermometer reads 160 or higher, remove the chicken from the oven, cover it, and let it sit for ten minutes before carving (the temperature will continue to climb at least to 165 degrees; the minimum safe temperature). If the temperature is below 160 when you check it, return the chicken to the oven for ten more minutes and check again.
We recently acquired a baking dish that can accommodate a nine pound chicken, though most chickens I roast weigh about six pounds. I put the chicken breast-side-up into the baking dish and then sprinkle with pepper, poultry seasoning, and onion powder. This goes into a 350 degree oven until the internal temperature of the meat reaches 160 degrees.Carve half the chicken for dinner: Remove a drumstick, wing, and thigh, and work the meat off the thigh with a knife. Then slice the breast into six or seven pieces. With sides such as peas, corn, beans, bread, salad, and mashed potatoes or rice, your first dinner is very robust. I usually repeat that meal the next day. Then the fun starts.
There’s quite a bit of meat on the bones after four people have had two meals. To remove that meat, put the chicken carcass into a stockpot and add water to cover it—about a gallon, depending on the shape of the pot. Cover the pot and set it to simmer for three or four hours at which point, turn off the heat and leave the pot to cool, covered, for a half hour.
After simmering for three or four hours, a roasted chicken carcass separates into individual bones, gristle, and chunks of chicken meat. The liquid is full of protein that will make it gel when it cools—and impart a lot of flavor to soup. I hand-pick the meat from the bones to be sure no bones end up in my soup; that’s the only time-consuming procedure in squeezing four or more meals for four out of a single chicken.By now the chicken skeleton, skin, and meat have disintegrated into a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. Pour off the liquid through a strainer into a second pot and then pick through the jigsaw puzzle, removing whatever meat you can find and adding it to the liquid in the second pot. It can take fifteen minutes but results in nearly a gallon of chicken and stock and chicken bits that you can turn into a robust soup to serve for two or more meals:
Place the stock and chicken on low heat and add 8 ounces of diced carrots; 2 sticks of celery, chopped; a medium onion, diced; 12 ounces of green beans; a quarter cup of white (cooking) wine; a quarter teaspoon of ground pepper; and a half teaspoon of poultry seasoning. Let this simmer for an hour, and then add 8 ounces of uncooked pasta or 4 ounces of uncooked rice and continue cooking until your preferred starch softens (10 to 20 minutes). Serve with bread and a salad.
After two nights of roasted chicken dinners, a few nights of chicken soup, salad, and bread make for lighter fare. While I suggest adding pasta or rice to bulk-up the soup, you might also try a mixture of rice and barley. Oh, yes! That’s a homemade yeast roll. I make a decent batch of rolls for all of $1.25 in ingredients. To buy as many pre-cooked rolls in a store would cost at least $12.Menus with cost and nutritional information:
Assuming you buy a six pound chicken at $.99 per pound, your first two meals look like this: Each diner gets 4 ounces roasted chicken, 3/4 cup mashed potatoes, ½ cup boiled carrots, garden salad with dressing, and 8 ounces of milk. A single serving provides 587 calories, 26 grams of fat, 127 mg of cholesterol, and 8 grams of fiber.
Each diner at your third and fourth meals gets about ten ounces of soup, a generous salad with dressing, a dinner roll, and a cup of milk—that’s 470 calories, 18 grams of fat, 42 mg of cholesterol, and 7 grams of fiber.
Over the course of four nights, you feed a family of four at an average cost per meal of $4.70. At that cost you can add dessert and still stay well within the budget.
Tips for super savings
Repurpose leftovers. I usually cook a meal for eight and serve it to my family of four two days in a row. This doesn’t always use up the main course. For example, if we have a serving or two of ham left over, I might dice it and add it to a pineapple-based sauce seasoned with soy, onion, and ginger. Rolled into crepes, the filling becomes the main course in a dinner for four.
With a little creative cooking, you can turn leftovers into meals that look nothing like the originals… and stretch your food budget significantly.
This post originally ran as an article in the Daily Item, Sunbury, PA’s local newspaper. I made minor edits and added material to adapt it for The Untrained Housewife.
What a great post! Thanks for sharing. This is our first year to raise our own meat chickens so I am excited to use these tips to get every last bit of meat out of our chickens and to make it last and save money.
Thanks for visiting! I hope you do make the most of every chicken you raise. Of course, you’ll have a very different experience when you “unwrap” your chicken and remove that package of extra body parts. The newspaper provides frustratingly little space for my column, so I didn’t explore for readers what they might do with the sweet meats… and I also didn’t explain gravy. Hmmm… Might be a few blog posts worth writing.
-Daniel
Well, I come from first generation baby boomers (66 yrs. old) and this is SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for the way I was raised. My folks raised chickens and rabbits, none of which went to waste. Regardless of what was raised, everything that was edible was used…including some things which I never could accept as food. Gram and mom got several meals out of each offering, being it chicken, beef, pork, rabbit, etc.. That is just the way it was…waste not, want not. And, I still cook the same way today. 🙂
Huggs & B*B ~ OwlOak
Thank you for your comment! Would that everyone applied such simple methods to stretch their food dollars. A future $7 Dinners post will show another way I use a chicken carcass. I do pretty well with ham as well, and I love to incorporate leftovers of all types into dishes so different that my family simply doesn’t recognize the leftovers.
I stretch chicken out this way as well. I sometime add part of the chicken into a gravy and use it over noodles or as a a pot pie. I also will fix a simple meal of chicken, rice, and mixed veggies mixed it- my family loves it.
Sounds as though we’d get along real well. Thanks for your comment. My family likes pot pie so much that on the rare occasions I make it, I start with large chunks of chicken… but I prefer to have stock available made from a chicken carcass left over from a previous meal.
Being from Alaska, it is rare to have $.79 a pound chickens. So being thrifty is a must. Meal #1 and #2 are as you do.. Meal #3 is usually the dark meat, 1 drumstick and 1 thigh debones and used in a Mexican cassaroll. Torn pieces of floured tortillas in a 9 X 13 baking dish, covering the bottom, layer half of the chicken, small pieces, green chilies, thinly sliced onion, Your choice, either cream of Chicken or Cream of Mushroom soup. (I add the can of soup plus a half can of milk, mixed well an pour half of it over onions and stuff in the dish…..cover with Montray Jack cheese, (about a cup to a cup and a half. Repete, salt and pepper to taste…You can add hot peppers if you choose. Top with more cheese Serve with a salad, roll and jello.
Meal #4, is sometimes Chicken salad: (eggs, walnuts, pickles, an apple, mayo, chopped fine, stuffed into med. scooped tomatoes.) ( I add the tomato scoopings to a salad. roll and pudding for desert.
Meal #5: We also love the dark meat chopped small and added to a gravy and served over rice or mashed potatoes.
Meal#6: Another way is using the dark meat, (or white meat) in spaghetti.
Thank you for all the great meal suggestions! A neighbor who read this article commented to me that she “Just doesn’t have time and energy to do all these things with a chicken.” I shudder to think that her alternatives might involve opening frozen plastic packages of commercially-prepared pseudo-food. It’s great to hear from readers who embrace the importance of using real food to create delicious and (more-or-less) healthful meals.