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http://ift.tt/2p7abWeSo here’s how I ate last week, starting with a chicken I got from the farm. With recipes/techniques! I meant there to be photos of all of the stages but I dunno if I succeeded.
I wish I could eat like this all the time. I don’t usually have the attention span. But here’s a look into it; my sister manages to eat like this regularly, though not normally in quite so immediate or organized a fashion– she just spontaneously comes up with this kind of leftovers-remixing off the top of her head. Me, I gotta plan it all out in advance. The key, I think, for me, is having stuff pre-prepped while I’m doing something else. I’d never make butternut squash soup, for example, if I had to start out by roasting it that night. But leftovers are key for this kind of thing.
1) Roast Chicken In Milk. I used Jamie Oliver’s recipe, covered it for half of the cooking time and then left it uncovered the other half. I have a great little cast iron Dutch oven my mother literally mailed to me, that was my grandmother’s, and it fits a chicken sort of snugly and is perfect. As side dishes, I: a) roasted a largeish butternut squash, cut in half, face-down in a metal baking pan with 1/4″ of water in it roasted for like, 45-60min at whatever temp the chicken is, and b) made a big casserole dish of macaroni and cheese. I have a recipe memorized for that, but if you need one, well, this is the original recipe my mom gave me, but I often brown a diced half an onion in the butter before I add the flour, for a more complex dish.
I made a pan sauce as I let the chicken rest by whisking some flour (not much) into the Dutch oven and all the stuff in it. There might be a note on that in the original recipe. Carved the chicken: all I served at that dinner was a breast, skin-on, for me, and a whole leg quarter for Dude, because I know that’s how much we’ll eat. I left the rest of the carcass until after dinner. Scraped out the whole butternut squash into a bowl, and only added fixins (butter and maple syrup and black pepper) to about a quarter of it.
Immediately after dinner, I cut the other leg quarter and skin-on breast off the chicken and put it into one container. I poured the pan gravy into container 2. I stripped the chicken carcass with my fingers of all the other large bits of meat– the rib meat, the hunks of meat behind the shoulders, anything that when I dug my fingers in was soft over the bones and wasn’t just connective tissue or bone or gristle, shredded it all up smallish, and put that into container 3. I put the leftover butternut squash into container 4. And then I dumped the stripped chicken carcass back into the Dutch oven, added a stalk of celery and some carrot ends, and added enough water to cover it, and then I put that on to boil. I let it simmer for an hour or two, then left it to sit overnight because I’m a slob.
The next morning I dumped the stock through a sieve into container number 5, put it into the fridge, and threw out the bones and soggy veggie bits.
2) Chicken Parts And Rice Pilaf With Baby Spinach
I had to look up how to make a rice pilaf. It turns out it’s easy. Like, way easier than risotto, which I also make all the time but I didn’t have the right kind of rice for just now. As the fat to brown the aromatics in, I used a frozen hunk of rendered pork cracklins in lard, because I have that. You could use bacon grease if you save that, or any oil if you don’t.
So I stuck the chicken bits from container 1 in the toaster oven on a lil baking sheet at 400 for however long everything else took me, and then looked up and figured out pilaf. I used half of the stock from container number 5, and I added the baby spinach at the end while it was resting with the lid on.
oh yeah I had a carrot in the pilaf because I wanted more vegetables. That was pretty tasty, especially since the chicken had so many seasonings on it.
The pilaf was so easy I also started bread dough. I made a recipe that calls for two separate hour-long rises, and just stuck it into the fridge for its second rise, so it could proof slowly overnight. More details on the bread, and a full disclosure about how many times I put this off, here.
3) Butternut Squash Soup and Homemade Bread
For this, all I did was use the leftover pan sauces from container number 2, a splash of the stock from container number 5, and the leftover butternut squash from container number 4. Got everything up to a boil, hit it with the immersion blender I happen to own and only use for this (you could just use a potato masher if you wanted), dumped in a little bit of whole milk to make it creamier, and then sat around waiting for the bread to finish.
This is kind of a light dinner; you can serve cheese to go on the bread if you want a few more calories to tide you over. There’s no second vegetable or anything, you could do side dishes if you wanted. But I didn’t.
4) Ramen With Shredded Chicken
I bought frozen ramen noodles, because our grocery store has them. I boiled them in water, meanwhile heating up the last of the chicken stock from container number 2. Once the stock was boiling, I added the shredded chicken from container number 3. When I served it, I topped it with most of the rest of the baby spinach. That’s it, that’s dinner.
(Another thing I’d thought of doing, but didn’t, was to make quesadillas instead– warm up the chicken, slice some cheese, throw the baby spinach on top and fry big flour tortillas in a frying pan, and top it with salsa as a second vegetable. I didn’t, though– maybe this week with a different leftover meat! Just– if you don’t have ramen noodles or some other really tasty soup noodle, this is another one to do, and you can just use up the stock in the other two dishes above that take it.)
(And then, 5, I didn’t have any more chicken, but i had a little spinach left, so I used up the last of the baby spinach in omelettes on Saturday morning, with cheese left over from making the macaroni and cheese, which I had eaten every day for lunch all week. I could have kept some chicken back for this but I didn’t need to.)
So– there’s a sample of doing one whole week’s menu planning off one major protein source, and a way to end up the week without leftovers.Full disclosure– we went out to dinner once or twice in there, and had one one-off dinner that Dude made, I think it was some frozen fish filets he defrosted, pan-fried, and served over rice with steamed frozen vegetables on the side, no leftovers used or generated. So it’s not like we never eat out or only eat on-plan, but. I grew up eating like this, and various people have told me they’ve never heard of this kind of thing, so here’s a sample of how it goes when it’s going well.
So here’s the grocery list, more or less, and I apologize if I’m assuming you have stuff in your kitchen that you normally don’t, or if I’ve left anything off.
A chicken (4.5 lbs, doesn’t really matter)onions, 3 or 4one container thing of baby spinacha butternut squash, any sizemilkcelerycarrotsfrozen ramen noodles
all the rest of these are things I keep in my kitchen:flouryeastriceassorted spices (cinnamon, salt, pepper, thyme?)butter or lard (i actually used rendered pork cracklins for the mac and cheese)pasta(optional: flour tortillas and salsa for the alternate meal)
You could customize this a lot for allergies, kosher preferences etc., and I’m working on a version now that starts off with a hunk of venison, so we’ll see how I do. Anyway. There’s that; I figured I’d write it up while I’m waiting for this week’s experimental bread to rise.
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