Making Your Dinner Work For You--Chicken Stock

Around Thursday of every week, an interesting phenomenon happens in my house. While nosing around looking for something to cook for dinner, someone usually comes to the horrifying conclusion that there are no proteins left in the fridge. Or the freezer. Panic ensues. "What's the big deal?" you may ask. "Just pop down to HEB and get some pork medallions." But it isn't so simple, dear internet. We buy groceries once a week. Additional trips can happen if someone really needs something for a baking project, but generally what is bought at the beginning of the week is what we've got. This is great for Monday dinner. Tuesday dinner is usually extravagant as well. Wednesday is typically leftovers re-presented in some exciting new way. But Thursday? Thursday is where it starts to go downhill, culminating Saturday night in a carbohydrate binge generally featuring macaroni and cheese, slathered with bacon, because we've got to get our fix somehow. So, how to buy enough proteins to last the week without spending more than $10 on meat? Yes, we know about beans. And quinoa. And eggs. We utilize them all. But still, we haven't been able to buy enough meat on our budget to feed us through the week. Until now.

Chicken tenders, beautifully prepared for you and ready to pop into a pan, usually cost around $2/lb. But there's another way. A whole way, if you will. We realized that whole chickens cost around $0.85/lb. Less than half of the prepped chicken. Well, I can wield a knife. And a whole chicken, as we've discovered, can do a lot more than make one meal.

I know that it looks intimidating. A naked, footless creature covered in pale goose bumps that somehow manages to stare at you despite its lack of head. It also looks much more like something that was once alive than anonymous strips of meat. However, you can take that uneasiness and channel it into something else: the fact that the per pound price of a whole chicken is about half that of prepared pieces of chicken. Furthermore, there are a lot of ways that you can use a whole chicken. These are some of the things we did with ours last night:

1. Baked the entire chicken in garlic and peppercorn for dinner.
2. Fed the chicken giblets to the cat. Bam! Dinner for everyone.
3. Leftover chicken for lunches, other meals. Will probably feed us for a few days.
4. Made chicken stock from the bones and carcass (I'm sure there's a better word here).
5. After the stock was done, saved the bones and leftover bits of chicken for the cat. Meals for 3-5 days (before the internet freaks out here, no I am not just giving cooked chicken bones to the cat. I will be grinding them into bonemeal first and using them to supplement a raw diet instead of feeding him packaged corn meal with beef flavor).

From one chicken that cost us about $3.50, we were able to feed 3 people 2-3 meals, feed a pet two meals a day for about 4 days, and make about a quart of chicken stock.

Since I will assume that most people can manage baking a chicken (if I have assumed this erroneously, feel free to peruse Google for tips, or Bing if you're one of those people), I'm going to cover making chicken stock. "What is chicken stock?," you may ask. Chicken stock is essentially really condensed chicken flavor (now with real chicken!). You can use chicken stock to make broth, soup, casseroles, etc. You can use it to wilt kale and other vegetables. You can even use it to cook rice, quinoa, or couscous. Essentially, if you have chicken stock you don't need to buy bouillon, broth, or other bases to flavor your food. Additionally, you can add in any vegetable scraps you would normally compost or throw away-- carrot tops, vegetable peels, stems. All of these things add really great flavor to your stock and get to be used before they're discarded. So, let's begin!

Basic Chicken Stock

Materials:
Large pot
Slotted spoon

Ingredients:
Water
Chicken carcass (seriously, there has to be a better word for this)
Onion
Garlic
Salt

Process:

We made this stock with a chicken that was already baked. While doing so takes a lot less (5-8 hours) time, you don't have to. You can also use a raw chicken and baby it for 8 hours.

1. Add the entire chicken to a pot of water. Chop onion and garlic into large chunks. Add salt, pepper, herbs, whatever else you feel like.



2. Cook on Medium/Low heat for 3-4 hours or until most of the meat has fallen off the bone. The idea here is for about half of the water to slowly evaporate, leaving you with a pot full of condensed chicken-flavored water.



3. When the stock is done, strain out the vegetables, chicken meat, and bones. Be sure to put a bowl underneath the strainer to catch the stock.



3. Once the stock is free of bones and vegetable matter, you can either pour it into ice cube trays or freezer-safe tupperware containers to store for later.



4. To use, you can either sensibly thaw a container of chicken stock, measure the amount you need, and refreeze it, or do what we do: Hack at a block of frozen chicken stock with a knife until you've accumulated enough chipped pieces that could maybe add up to 2 cups.

Effort Rating (on a scale of 1 to Fuck This!)
4

Cost Comparison:
4 lbs whole chicken: $3.40
Veggie scraps: Free

4 lbs of chicken tenders: $8
1 jar of Better Than Bouillon: $4
1 quart chicken stock: $3
Raw chicken for cat: $2
Total if we'd bought separately: $17