A Chicken’s Tale: How to Eat Well on a Budget

I love to eat good food. Gone are the days when I just shoved any old thing into my pie hole. Fast “food” is definitely out. It may seem cheap when looking at the monetary cost to purchase it. In holistic terms however it is anything but. All those burgers, fries, and cherry pies are filled with chemicals, have next to no nutritional value and often contain poisonous genetically modified organisms. The conditions the animals are kept in are appalling as is the waste inherent in the factory “farms” and all the packaging for the “meal”. One may save a few pennies by stopping at the local drive thru today and then pay a much higher price later when the doctor bills come due. There is a more healthful way to go about things than eating processed foods.

Recently, I purchased a whole organic chicken from the co-op we are members if in New Haven. The chicken was approximately 4 pounds and cost around $24. I can almost hear the air being sucked out of the room by anyone reading this and the accompanying exclamations of shock and horror at that impossibly high priced bird! When all was said and done however that one bird provided us with a dozen meals. That’s right 12 meals were made with that one chicken as well as a full quart of chicken broth, which will be turned into yet more meals. When looked at from that perspective, a $24 chicken makes a lot more sense than a Big Mac from McDevil’s or a bucket of “chicken” from Colonel Buzzard. We ate for several days because I used the entire chicken.

I like to use a crock pot to cook a whole chicken. As the bird cooks slowly it becomes tender and delicious. I baked two large organic yams in the oven (which provided starch for five of the12 meals in and of themselves) and added some organic broccoli to the crock pot near the end of the cooking time to round things out. When we had eaten all the legs, thighs, breasts and wings over the course of six meals, I took the crock out of the fridge to begin separating the rest of the meat from the bones. There is a surprising amount of meat left in the crock pot when cooking a chicken this way. It takes a little patience to separate the meat-seeing that big pile of chicken showed that it is well worth it though. Along with the meat, I piled up the bones on a cloth to boil for broth. The tiny bits of meat I missed or couldn’t get off the bones just enriched the broth. There is also the chicken fat that had congealed in the fridge which I used for the next recipe.

Organic rice is really inexpensive and nutritious. I combined two cups of rice with the chicken fat and all the meat I had separated to make a big pot chicken and rice with curry spices. There was plenty of chicken mixed in with the rice and the fat helped to make it really rich. It was if I say so myself delicious. The meals of chicken and rice (6 in total) were made even more delicious with the addition of some Swamp Yankee Killah hot sauce made in small batches by a friend of mine named Jason Morse here in New Haven. It added a spicy kick to our meals as well as adding to the local economy because I buy it direct from Jason. It always feels good to me to support local artisans!

Today I will make a root vegetable soup with the quart of chicken broth that remains from the chicken. I imagine that will feed us for a number of days both well and inexpensively using almost all organic ingredients. The most expensive ingredient was of course the chicken. When it all adds up though making over a dozen meals in this way is surely cheaper and infinitely more healthful than buying a dozen “value meals” at a purveyor of poison like Burger King.

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