chicken sequence

[dragonlady7]

via https://ift.tt/3tsETZG

so I made a post some years ago which of course I cannot now find about cooking Chicken Four Ways, taken from a pamphlet my sister used to hand out at the farmer’s market, back when they didn’t have a permit to cut up their chickens so they were mostly trying to sell whole ones. And people are like “oh but there’s only two of us we can’t get through a whole chicken”, and then they buy an extremely expensive boneless skinless chicken breast and it’s so much money for so little meat, and then they’re like “i can’t afford to eat organic/pasture-raised/humane/processed with no human slave labor” and go to Wal Mart and buy Case Farms chicken and so on.

So, here’s an updated example of what I do, a person who lives with one other person and works full-time, with a frozen whole chicken carcass. This is links to other people’s recipes so there’s not so much of my “you know, cook it until it’s done!” methodology here as usual. 😂

On Friday I moved the chicken, a 4.9-lb roaster, from the freezer to the fridge, setting it in a pan in case of leakage. On Sunday it was still pretty frozen, so I set it in its pan on the counter for a couple of hours while I got everything else ready. There’s better guidelines for how to safely defrost a roast chicken; I have never food-poisoned myself doing this method though.

Sunday evening I made the NYT Chicken Under A Brick https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/8589-chicken-under-a-brick recipe; to avoid the paywall, just google the phrase or use incognito mode. I have a cast iron griddle so I lightly greased that and used it on the top and it worked very well. To cut the backbone out of a broiler chicken I recommend cutting the skin by the tail with a sharp knife (cut the belly skin too if there’s a lot) and then using kitchen shears and self-confidence; it doesn’t have to be neat. I didn’t bother removing the backbone entirely– I cut down from the top to remove the neck, but then I realized it didn’t really matter. I threw the neck in the pan and roasted it as well, then threw it in a bag in the freezer to make stock with later.

I served both leg quarters, plus we ate all the crispy skin off the carcass, and saved the rest of the chicken carcass in a container in the fridge. I saved the leg bones after we ate in a baggie in the freezer to make stock later.

Monday we ate something else.

Tuesday I started dinner prep early, and got the chicken carcass out of the fridge, picked the meat off and shredded it, and put the bones in one container and divided the meat into two. I intended to make stock, now, with the parts I’d saved in the freezer and all my vegetable ends, but I realized I already had stock from the last time I’d done this, so I didn’t.

I then made this lemon chicken orzo recipe https://www.saltandlavender.com/lemon-chicken-orzo/. I used half of the meat I’d picked from the carcass and it worked beautifully.

Wednesday we ate something else. Thursday we ate ramen, with some of the chicken stock, but we didn’t use any of the remaining meat– we could have, but did not. And then Friday, I took the last of the remaining shredded chicken and the last of the broth, and I made chicken enchiladas from this recipe https://www.isabeleats.com/red-chicken-enchiladas/, with the quick sauce linked to in the recipe.

So, there’s another Chicken Sequence, and you might note that really it’s not that much and you don’t wind up eating chicken until you’re tired of it.

This is a more affordable way of accessing ethical meat. Some people buy whole chickens fresh from us and cut them up themselves, but I don’t find it much easier to cook with parts; I prefer to just cook the whole thing and then subdivide. So. Anyway gonna throw this in the queue now that I’ve been able to close my recipe tabs; it’s partly for my own records. 😄 (Your picture was not posted)

Comments

[unicornduke]

I actually saved the text of that Chicken Four Ways post and onenote saves the link. here's the link!

https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/171771786289/one-chicken-fourish-ways-for-2-people-a-recipe