Stretching the budget

caroln

Senior Member
Location
Kentucky
Just out of curiosity I decided to see how far I could stretch one chicken, so Friday my husband and I rotiserried a chicken weighing about 3 ½ pounds. We ate it Friday night, had chicken sandwiches Saturday, had left over chicken Saturday night, and since I still had chicken scraps left, Sunday night I put them in gravy, made biscuits out of Bisquick and spooned the chicken over the biscuits. The chicken cost me $5.15. We got 3 dinners out of one chicken so it cost us 86 cents per meal per person. Plus one lunch. Best deal ever! (For the record, I am now sick of chicken. :sick:)
 

I made a burrito bowl for lunch with chicken, bell peppers, onions, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, and salsa, (we're out of rice), which was probably no more than $2.00 worth of ingredients. You can eat well for not a whole lot of money if you use chicken instead of red meat.

We had burgers for dinner. At $8.00/lb for ground beef, the patties alone were $2.00 each.
 

You can make it two lunches by making stock with the bones! Roast chicken bones make the best broth.
Darn!! I didn't think of that! Oh yeah, I forgot to mention I made the gravy out of some chicken broth I had in the freezer! But would you believe I can't make a decent soup? I've tried and tried and I just can't get it right.
 
I've often a made three meals from a chicken. I generally jointed the bird, used the breasts for one meal, The legs for another and boiled the carcass to make the basis of a broth. I could easily buy a chicken for the equivalent of $5, but I find that for $8 -$10 I can get a bird with much better taste and texture,
 
Capt Lightning, My $5.15 chicken was Tyson on sale. Is there a brand better than Tyson for taste? I'm unaware of chicken brand differences!
 
Yup

I'd watch gramma snap their heads off with a jerk of her wrist

Fascinating for a four year old to watch......well.....chikins runnin' around with their heads cut off

My dad would chop off their heads with an axe, and it was my sister's and my job to go watch where they went so they didn't get lost in the field.

Funny, now that seems really, really gross for a child of 6 or 7 to do, but back then it was just what we did and we didn't see it as upsetting at all.

What I really hated was helping pluck chickens -- it was hard and feathers flew everywhere.
 

Back
Top