Make Chicken Work For You

Cabin at the cabin

I used to teach a quilt class called Make Color Work for You, to show that the sky is the limit once you start manipulating the goods you have on hand.  These two quilts use the same concept of the basic Barn Raising setting.  One is an actual Log Cabin quilt the other is a Lady of the Lake using the barn raising setting of the blocks.  Color did all the work.

Lady of the Lake

I know you’re wondering what in the heck do quilts have to do with chicken, but every Sunday I take a basic chicken and turn it into a lot of food for the week.  I’m manipulating the goods to take an expensive bit of meat and turn it into meals for work, broth, dinners and dog food.  Food patterns if you will.  Despite what goes on at the supermarket with cheap subsidized chicken, chicken is not a cheap meat to produce.  You can buy a chicken already cooked for half what I spend to raise it, that doesn’t count processing and storing that food.  Therefore I have to practice fiscal responsibility for my home economy.

Your home economy may be different.  Mine is ruled in part by my husband’s food needs.  It used to be that we ate the same, cooking was easy.  He’s always been a little delicate in the digestive department, until finally after decades of suffering he had three feet of his small intestine removed.  Your intestine is not just a thirty foot length of pipe, he’s missing a part that works to absorb nutrients from food.  Gah.  I have the cast iron stomach around here, which is kind of interesting.  He was breastfed, I was not.  I was a formula baby like my milk cow.  I should be the delicate one.

So enter bone broth and stock.  It’s a weekly deal around here, I raise 50 chickens to get us through the year.  Rather than part all the chickens out when we process them, I freeze them whole and use up one a week.  With the whole chicken I have a blank slate to work with, keeping them whole works with the way we eat.  We eat differently in summer anyway, you won’t catch me making pot pie in August…

Every Sunday because I have to prepare my husbands work week lunches, I work up a chicken.  As a side note here, I have a little leeway on taking a couple of days to do this because we process the chickens ourselves and they are clean.  Store chicken, I would not trust it to be frozen, thawed and refrozen.  Organic or not, the bacteria load is just too great.  If you don’t raise them yourself, seek out a small farmer.

We raise the controversial Cornish Cross, and we’ve not found them to be the terrible bird that you hear about so often.  For my home economy they fit because they are efficient and fit in with our workload in early summer.  When we sold eggs and were raising hundreds of replacement pullets each year,  we ate the roosters that came with the “sexed” pullets.  Times change, the cost of the roosters went in the egg production expense column.  Now I would find it hard to feed and protect those roosters for 5 months to get them to a good size.  Again, this is what we do, others may have a different approach.  I have no expectations that these chickens will do anything but produce a good-sized carcass and provide me with a lot of manure for the pasture, and I certainly don’t want to throw more money or time at this project.

Once the chicken is thawed, I work it up.

One breast butterflied into five pieces and sauteéd for lunch.

One breast chunked for fajitas.  Usually we eat this Sunday night, if not I put this back in the freezer for another day.

Thighs and drumsticks removed.  I refrigerate the thighs and one drumstick for Monday dinner (oven fried chicken), and put the remaining drumstick in a gallon sized freezer bag that holds drumsticks from previous weeks.  They could be made into several meals, stock…picnic you name it.

At this point I have a carcass with wings and neck still attached and whatever meat I have missed while parting out.  The meaty carcass goes into a covered roaster with about 5 or 6 quarts of water and carrots, onion, and garlic.  I roast this for about 4 hours at 400°F.  This becomes my first broth.  I tried stockpot, crockpot, roasting first, not roasting, and reduction.  All took too much time and gave me differing results.  The high heat in the covered roaster does the trick.  I no longer have to reduce the stock just to add water later.  When chilled the broth gels slightly and that is what I need for a gut soothing food for my husbands meals.  The yield is about 6 quarts of broth, which is about right, he drinks a pint for breakfast and takes a pint in his lunch.  The broth easily keeps for a week in the refrigerator so there is no more energy consumption, no canning or freezing.

At this point I pick off any meaty parts from the wing and back for pot pie or soup.  Depending on the chicken’s size this may be a cup or two.

So far I’ve got 6 quarts of broth, 5 lunches for one, 3 dinners for 3 and I’m still not done with the carcass.

Since the first broth of 6 quarts is spoken for, I need some broth/stock for cooking too.  We eat a lot of braised greens or cabbage and stock is usually the liquid of choice.  Soups and stews take up quite a bit too so the carcass goes this time in the crockpot with more garlic, onions, carrots and chicken feet with about 4 quarts of water.  This will yield another 4 quarts of stock for cooking throughout the week.  I find if I have it in the refrigerator I will use it instead of water.

Finally the rest goes to the dogs.  I strain the broth and pick through what’s left pulling out all the bones.  No cooked chicken bones for dogs.  Usually with the skin and all the gluck…I end up with about 2 quarts of goodies for the pups, and a good-sized handful of bones for the fire.

So the breakdown from a five-pound home-raised broiler:

10 quarts of broth.
5 slices of breast meat for a week of lunches.
3 meals with chicken meat for 3 – dinner usually because we are all home at night and enjoy our big meal together. (Usually fajitas, oven-fried chicken, honey glazed chicken, chicken vegetable soup or chicken curry pot pie)
2 quarts of dog food.
1 pint of bones for ash.

MiG Cornish Cross meat birds

So yes, the chicken is expensive but you can make the chicken work for you by intensive management in the pasture and in the kitchen.  Not quite a pretty as a quilt but certainly tasty enough.