Or taquitos, or tacos. I’ve said this a few times. The Thanksgiving turkey becomes ‘turquitos’, leftover rotisserie chicken becomes enchiladas or taquitos, leftover roast beef becomes enchiladas or tacos… Last night it was fried chicken.
Sometime last week I bought some cold fried chicken from the supermarket deli. I used one thigh to put in the salad I would make for our dinner that night. I had a couple of wings for snacks two days. I reheated the rest for dinner another night. I had a breast and a leg, and Mrs. L.A. had a leg and half a breast. That left us with the other half of the breast and a thigh.
I removed the skin and picked the meat from the bones. I chopped up the meat and simmered it with some chili powder, cumin, the rest of the pico de gallo that was in the fridge, and some water. There was enough for four chicken-and-cheese flautas.
(Don’t worry, the skins didn’t go to waste. I nuked them an ate them while the flauta filling was simmering. )
I just read an article saying that rotisserie chicken is more expensive per pound that cook-it-yourself chicken. But the unit price is only $7, which is the same or less that you’d pay for a single meal at many drive-throughs. We eat less than half of one on the evening I bring it home, have some more another night, and then the rest gets wrapped in tortillas. Not bad for a fin and a deuce.
I roasted a chicken last week (as opposed to buying a rotisserie one). I snacked on the leftovers, expecting The Missus to make her ‘enchilada casserole’. (That’s the layers of tortillas, chicken, cheese, and cream of mushroom soup. I make actual enchiladas when I make enchiladas.) She didn’t, so yesterday I asked if she was going to make it; else I was going to make taquitos. I prepared taquitos last night.
I shredded the remaining chicken and simmered it in Rotel’s salsa, chili powder (not sure what kind; I bought it from a bulk bin a while ago), cumin, and a cup of water. Lots of chicken left. I used a 1½ quart saucepan, and it was just barely big enough. When the chicken simmered long enough, I heated up the cast-iron frying pan (‘5’ or ‘6’ on the electric range) and warmed six-inch corn tortillas one at a time for 12-15 seconds per side, and rolled the meat up in them. I came out with 24 taquitos, plus one smaller one the size of what you get in the frozen food section of the supermarket. I put them in four zip-top bags and put them in the freezer for quick snacks/meals later. I’ll get one packet out for dinner tonight.
The other option was chicken-and-cheese flautas (they call them ‘crisperitos’ up here :rolleyes: ), but Mrs. L.A. prefers taquitos.
The difference isn’t so much. Typically, here a 3 pound raw chicken will run you about $5-$6. The rotisserie chicken at my grocery is $4.99 (this past week) to $6.99, and it looks to be about the same size. I’m sure the cooked chicken weighs less, of course, because of the moisture driven off by cooking. I was going to roast my own chicken for some curry chicken salad last week, and it was cheaper and easier for me to get the rotisseries, as they were at $5. Plus I don’t have to heat up the kitchen by running it for an hour to cook the chicken.
Here, rotisserie chicken costs $6.98 for what looks to have started out as maybe a three-pound bird. The Foster Farms chicken I roasted last week was 5.8 pounds at 99¢ per pound, so it cost $5.72.
No worries heating up the kitchen. It’s like someone flipped a switch. ‘OK, we’re done with Summer now.’ It went from 80º on a Friday to 70º on Saturday, and currently it’s 50º.
It gets down to 99c a pound here, too, depending on what sales are running. If you don’t need a whole chicken, quarters can be as low as 39 cents a pound. In those cases, yeah, I’d buy the raw bird and cook it myself. Typically, if I’m just buying roast chicken to make a salad or to pull the meat off for tacos or enchiladas, I go the rotisserie route (unless they have some 99 cent special). If I want actual roast chicken for dinner, I buy the raw and season it and roast it myself.
Sunday I roasted a 5.5 pound (2.5 kg) chicken (Note to pulykamell, it was 99¢ per pound ), and we ate some for dinner with roasted potatoes, green beans, red onion, and rosemary. I had a large grilled chicken-and-cheddar sandwich during the week. We ate some more for dinner last night, along with the rest of the potatoes. After removing the bones and skin, we still had 1.2 pounds (over ½ kg) left. So I minced it with a chef’s knife and simmered it in two packets of taco seasoning and a bit over a cup of water. When it cooled, I added drained 4-ounce (113 g) and drained 7-ounce (198 g) cans of diced Ortega chiles and put it in the fridge until I was finished working. Then I mixed about ¾ pound (⅓ kg) of shredded Mexican cheese (Kraft, in a bag). I steamed 20 large-ish corn tortillas and my remaining 7 regular-sized corn tortillas, and rolled up the chicken mixture in them. So now we have 27 fat taquitos. We’ll have 5 to 7 of them for dinner tonight, and the rest will go into the freezer for easy meals on other days.
Dang, dude, you are certainly industrious! I felt good buying the lil’wrekker a dijorno pizza, Mr.Wrekker has gone back to the deer camp, so he will eat there. I am a lazy slacker today. No excuses, just am!
Actually, it’s me being lazy. Roasting meat is super easy, and rolling the leftovers in tortillas and freezing them means I don’t have to cook several other days.
ETA: Additional evidence for laziness. Pre-shredded Mexican cheese, packets of taco seasoning, cans of chiles…
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