NEXT MONTH we will be working with Getaway Farm to film a week of recipes from a single bird & create a downloadable shopping list. It will be posted on our Youtube channel after May 12th: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLocalTravelerNS
Last month, we went 28 days on a $200 food budget. During that time, we received lots of tips and tricks to save money on our monthly purchases without sacrificing healthy food. We based many of our budget month meals around vegetables to keep things cheap, but a few of you kept telling us about the wonders of chicken.
Since March 1, we’ve been a little indulgent, in no small part due to a craft beer tour of the east coast and four days (over) indulging in New York. And so, this week, we’ve set out on a mission to see how many unique, healthy dinners we can make with a single local chicken. We spent just under $100 on all our food for the week (including any unrelated breakfast and lunch foods), and set to work.
Day One (Monday): Roast Chicken Dinner
Ingredients:
1 5.5 lb locally raised chicken
1 500 ml beer (I would use less next time – 355 ml would do)
Assorted spices (I used basil, bay leaf, salt and pepper)
Splash of olive oil
Two medium potatoes
Two carrots
1/2 Onion
I purchased a frozen chicken from Meat Mongers at the Halifax Seaport Market during our regular Saturday shopping trip, after a significant amount of meal planning (thanks for all the suggestions, Twitter friends!). A few people had suggested marinating the chicken in local beer, and, since I’ve been trying my hand at brewing the past few months, that’s exactly what I did.
It took about 20 minutes Monday morning to throw together the marinade. I used an imperial red ale, olive oil, and spices. At 3 pm, I threw the chicken and marinade in our roast pot with two potatos, two carrots, and half an onion. There are only two of us in my household and that ended up being too many veggies, but I’ve saved the leftovers. Not sure what I’ll do with them yet.
I boiled down the marinade and drippings, and added corn starch to make gravy. We didn’t use any with our meal (the meat was perfect, no dressings required) so I have frozen the gravy for future use.
We picked a beautiful bird. It was 5.5 lbs and while it looked small, it hid the meat well. After we ate, I picked the bones as clean as I could, then threw all the bones and other bits into a pot with some carrots, celery, celery seed, and a little salt, and boiled it for two hours to make stock. It made about 12 cups.
Later Days Prep:
Monday was a long day. The roast was fairly easy to put together and required little work once it was in the oven, but it ended up being a long cooking day. After prepping the stock, I chopped and divided the chicken for each of our upcoming meals, then set to work creating a gluten free chicken pot pie and a chicken curry.
Our February challenge taught me the importance of pre-planning and pre-cooking some meals when possible (which it isn’t always – time is an issue for many of us). In addition to reducing food spoilage and making the rest of the week a little easier, pre-cooking allows me to better portion out meals.
In addition to our day 1 dinner and later days dinners, we got 12 cups of stock and 2 cups of gravy from our chicken roast.
Day 2: Chicken Curry
We made a veggie curry last week – a Mutter Paneer that we made with local cheese from Rancher Farms. This week, I subbed out the cheese for chicken. The end result was still REALLY good, but I have to admit I preferred the cheese. The cheese, however, was $10 for this dish (update: Bought it direct from the farmer this week for half the cost!), where as the chicken for this one probably cost me less than half of that when you break down the cost of the bird.
I got two dinners and one lunch out of this. We actually only ended up eating the lunch portion tuesday night (served with rice) because Drew had an unexpected dinner engagement. Drew also had lunch taken care of (he has something called soup group each Tuesday at work). I also ate up the leftovers from Monday’s dinner for Tuesdays lunch.
Day 3: Chicken Fried Rice
Wednesday was chicken fried rice day, something that quite a few of you suggested. There is no specific recipe for this – its meant to be a bit of a hodge podge. I used gluten free soy sauce in mine. I ended up accidentally cooking way too much rice. Like, WAY too much rice). Two cups dried rice that left my rice cooker overflowing.
I bought a few in-season veggies. To save money, we have been trying to find meals with similar ingredients, so the onions and carrots purchased for our Monday night roast also found their way into the fried rice tonight. I also bought some mushrooms from the market because they were a great price ($2.25 for a container). I chopped and cooked the onions in some butter first, then added half the container of mushrooms (chopped) and two peeled and chopped carrots. Then I sprayed the whole thing with the GF soy sauce, added the rice, and cracked two eggs overtop. This was the end result…
There should have been enough for two meals but both Drew and I accidentally skipped lunch, so we ate the whole thing, except a lunch-sized portion for Drew for tomorrow. But, there is leftover rice and veggies for me! On Wednesday I also prepped the chickpeas for our next creation, a white chicken chilli. I also took the last eight dollars of my budget this week and went on a candy binge at bulk barn. Not my most thoughtful or local purchase, but a great treat none the less.
Day 4: Gluten Free Chicken Pot Pie
I sent Drew with the leftovers from Wednesday night’s chicken rice, and was able to make myself lunch with the rice and vegetables left over (no chicken in mine, though).
I cooked a chicken pot pie day one and froze it for what I knew would be a busier Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I’m glad I did. Even with this meal ready-to-go in the freezer, I was half tempted to take the bit of remaining chicken I had left and throw it into some nachos. This ended up being a mix between a Sheppard’s pie and a chicken pot pie. I used this recipe, but replaced the pie crust with mashed potatoes and the flour with cornstarch. The potato top was a pretty basic boil and smash mashed, but I added a tiny bit of milk and some paprika. This dish turned out really well, but took a long time to re-heat from frozen. We got dinner out of it, plus two lunches the next day, and one additional lunch over the weekend.
Day 5: Chicken Enchiladas
Oh man, this was a perfect Friday supper! It was actually pretty healthy, but satisfied like a plate of Shoe Shop nachos. I picked up corn tortillas and cheese from the Halifax Seaport Market. Many of the other ingredients will be able to be sourced locally come summer, but not right now. I used this recipe, but forgot to purchase Mexican spice and enchilada sauce (oops!). I was able to make a close-enough Mexican spice with stuff I had on-hand. Not so much for the enchilada sauce. The filling made way more than I expected (I used more corn, tomatoes, and onions than the recipe called for) so I just covered it in as much sauce as I could and hoped for the best. It turned out well, but because I didn’t have the sauce, some parts of the corn tortillas cooked up dry. We ate half the pan between two of us. There is still half a pan in my freezer, so I picked up a can of enchilada sauce for this week and will cover it with sauce to re-heat.
Day 6: Mutter Paneer
We ended up hosting a pot luck dinner Saturday night and one of our guests is vegetarian, so, while we had the chicken curry in the freezer, we ran out and bought a few extra ingredients to make the same dish but with no meat. That means the chicken curry is still in my freezer for this week, but would have been used in this spot if not. Here is the recipe (which is SO GOOD with paneer from local business Rancher Acres if you want to keep it veggie). I replaced the paneer with the chicken for our purposes.
Day 7: White Chicken Chili
I cooked this one earlier in the week and froze it. Here is the recipe we used. I love chili but have never made one with chicken. This was really different, closer to a hearty soup. It had a nice heat, but may be too spicy for some. We still have a big container left. I froze it along with the rest of our leftovers.
Which means, in addition to eating the bulk of lunch and dinner last week on our chicken, at the end of the week we are left with:
Two Chicken Curry Dinners (would have only been one because of the dinner party)
One Chicken Chili Dinner
One Chicken Pot Pie Lunch
One Chicken Enchilada Dinner
One huge pot of soup (made with broth from our chicken and extra roast veggies)
Potato pancakes (to serve with the soup)
A large container of gravy
Six cups of chicken stock
That also meant that this week I just had to buy a few buffer items to get us through this week. In addition to what is in the freezer, I picked up local cheese curds to have with potatoes and the gravy, and a few breakfast and lunch items. My bill came to $65 this week (including the extra dinner party ingredients), bringing our two week food bill to $165.00. Our biggest single item expense was the local chicken, which makes sense considering it was the base for each meal.
Local Ingredients Used (Halifax Seaport Market):
Chicken
Onions
Carrots
Potatoes
Cheddar
Cilantro
Garlic
Spinach (not mentioned – used for breakfasts)
Corn Tortillas
Mushrooms
eggs
milk
Come summer, these ingredients could also be sourced locally:
Corn
Peas
Tomatoes
Hot peppers
As learned from our $200 February Food Budget challenge, planning is important, and so is having a quick look pre-planning to see what you have on hand or what is close to spoiling. What are your tips for shopping and eating on a budget? Do you have a favourite healthy chicken dish that could fit into a future chicken week? Let me know in the comments below!
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