I don’t cook a lot of chicken. For one thing, I have yet to master Southern Fried Chicken. Partially, probably, because I can’t bring myself to buy buttermilk. The Thanksgiving turkey more than satisfies my desire for poultry. But every few months I like some chicken.
Thursday I bought a whole bird. (A cheap one, not free-range and organic.) I disassembled it (Yay! I get to use my cleaver!) and baked it with olive oil, lots of garlic, salt, pepper, and some paprika. We each had a leg, and we shared about half of one breast. Friday we each had a wing, and shared the other half of one breast. The SO didn’t eat all of her breast meat, so there was about half a cup of chicken chunks left. That found its way into an alfredo sauce served over spaghetti (We’re out of fettuccini), with breadsticks made from pizza dough. I had the leftovers from that for lunch today. Dinner tonight? We had the thighs and finished off the mashed potatoes, and had some of the broccoli I steamed Sunday. But there was a problem. There was hardly any gravy left! I faked it. I found some bouillon powder in the cupboard. I made a roux, added milk and bouillon powder, and the little bit of leftover gravy.
So that’s four meals for two people, plus one meal for one person, and there’s still a big breast left! Maybe we’ll reheat it and eat it with more broccoli. Or maybe it will become chicken salad. In any case, we’re getting a lot of mileage out of one chicken.
Nothing like stretching your chicken, I always say.
I just find it disgusting. Dad loved it. The SO likes it. It makes me gag. I can use it in recipes (have, in fact), but then there’s this container of buttermilk sitting in the fridge being disgusting.
I regularly parcel out a whole bird for a week’s worth of eating for one. I’ll toss wings, backs, and breastbone into a small crockpot to “roast.” It’s easy to pull off shredded bits for salad, soups and casseroles, plus cover the bones with water for stock. Since I also make vegetable stock regularly, I don’t bother with veggies in my chicken stock and mix them later.
Buy the pack of powdered buttermilk and reconstitute at need. When not needed it lives gently in the back of a cupboard. I transfer the extra powder into a glass canning jar to keep it dry and bugfree. It claims it does not reconstitute, but it does if you do it in plain milk.
I love cooking whole chickens. There are so many good ways to use the leftovers. My favorite is probably chicken salad sandwiches for lunch the next day.
Another favorite is to take leftover baked chicken and make a soup out of. I make sure to include all the non-fat pan drippings in the soup; you can’t get that flavor out of mere broth.
On the buttermilk front, my wife can regularly find pint-sized containers of buttermilk. That’s about how much we use when making fried chicken, and it’s only two batches of pancakes. Of course, she actually likes drinking buttermilk, so that takes care of anything that might not fit into a recipe. I can’t stand the taste straight, but I do love what it does in things.