On $13 Chickens

When is a thirteen dollar chicken worth it?

And no, that's not a 13 dollar monstrosity of a hen. It was a fine little 3.25 pound lady, cleaned, without necks or giblets (sadly - I make tasty stock from those parts) from the farmers' market, specifically Eco Friendly Foods. I've written plenty about the importance of buying humanely raised meats, and of purchasing food raised locally, and of buying from the farmers' market, so I won't repeat myself. Nonetheless, the decision to buy a $13 bird for two people for no particular special occasion wasn't an easy one.

Having recently had a come to Jesus meeting of the worst kind with our finances (involving some credit card sticker shock, followed by budget entering sticker shock, followed by unforeseen expenses sticker shock, followed by... well, you get the picture), we've put the kibosh on eating out, with a couple of exceptions, to be done cheaply (like when we go to Baltimore this Friday to see Pirates of Penzance in which a dear friend performs), and we've decided to scale back our grocery purchases.

You see, in the past few months, the vast majority of our monthly money after rent and student loan payments had gone toward stuffing our faces, both in and outside the home. So, while we don't exactly have to go the Extreme Frugality route, things need to be reined in. Tightly.

For one, rather than choosing whatever suited our whim each evening, we've returned to our old habit of meal planning. And we've made what we dub a "Nom Book" - a list of the restaurants and meals we really want to try, old favorites excluded for the moment. In a sense, we're saving toward those things, making it easier to forego a second glass of wine at Happy Hour (not that I've been to too many lately, but booze is not a part of our terrible spending habits as I budget it separately - that's right, we have separate eating out and drinking out categories in our budget - and it's a tiny portion of the money we spend), or to eat leftovers rather than grab a piece of chicken at the deli near work.

But a big part of the problem has to do with making the best of what we buy as well, which is where the dilemma over the $13 dollar chicken came in. I knew it would taste good (and, oh, did it ever), but would it be worth it, when we could probably get twice the chicken, at least in thighs, at Whole Foods? We decided to gamble on it, and I planned out 3 meals with the chicken: roast chicken, veggies and corn; chicken and mushroom lasagna; and stuffed patty pan squash. I figured that by that point, all the meat would be gone, and I would boil the bones for broth. Given that chicken broth costs any where from 7 - 15 cents an ounce (at the Giant, via Peapod, probably more for organic, Kitchen Basics, or at Whole Foods), I figured I could at least break even on the chicken.

I began by brining the chicken. I knew it would taste a little more meaty, having been pastured, but I guessed that the meat might be drier from a lack of fat. So I brought some water, salt, brown sugar and lemon juice to a simmer, and when it cooled, I sat my chicken down in it for a few hours. Then, I dried her off, and rubbed her meat (under the skin) with a combination of salt, pepper, lemon rind, parsley, dill, and basil. There was enough leftover to rub into her skin too. I roasted her at 375 until done (I lost track of time, and our thermometers both crapped out on us during this process, so, I was afraid she might have been a little over done, but she wasn't at all).

We ate the drumsticks and a little of the thigh meat that night with some vegetables. The meat was rich, buttery, melt in your mouth chicken - probably the best I've ever cooked at home. This wasn't due to brine, although I'm sure that helped - it was what I had read about: a "chickenier" chicken. I liked it.

The next day I chopped the breast meat into cubes, layered it with a very slight amount of tomato sauce, noodles, cheese, herbs, and the first two steps of a duxelles (very finely chopped mushrooms with the liquid squeezed out - save the liquid and add it to broth or water to cook rice in, delicious). It was a fine lasagna; the breast meat was delicious and moist, and held the flavors of the roast and worked beautifully with the other ingredients. It gave us a dinner and three lunches.

Faced with the still astonishing amount of meat on the chicken, I decided to add a fourth meal - a vegetable pot pie with chicken (there wasn't enough for stuffed squash and a pot pie with chicken as the star). For the squash, I chopped about a 1/4 cup of chicken, added the diced tops of the squash, riced cooked with red pepper flakes and cumin, herbs, and parmesan cheese. The filled patty pans were salted and peppered and drizzled with olive oil, and baked. They were delicious, and served with roasted broccoli, were incredibly satisfying. We had two squash, and each got dinner and lunch. The pot pie was made of broccoli, celery, onion, 1/2 cup of chicken, frozen lima beans, and plenty of herbs. I warmed these in a sauce pan, then coated them with flour, which I browned. Then I spooned in some fresh made stock (more on that in a second) and made a thick sauce. I poured it all into a pie pan, topped with biscuit dough, and baked until the biscuits were dark brown on top. It was a huge success - and has been dinner and lunch for 2, with one lunch (mine!) for tomorrow.

So, just in terms of meals served, that chicken cost about 81 cents a meal for 16 meals. Not a terrible deal. But when you add in that I boiled the bones for approximately 2 quarts of stock (currently in my freezer), the chicken becomes an even better buy (especially because the stock is so good, and has no added stuff in it). At 32 ounces, the least expensive store bought broth would cost $22.40, more than my chicken cost in the first place.

Sometimes, I guess, an expensive chicken is worth it. I was okay with a couple of meals have less meat in them, but even if I hadn't been, the chicken still would have ended up being a huge bargain. It can be difficult to make those decisions - buying a 13 dollar chicken when you know you need to budget more carefully can feel self-indulgent - but looking at things from the point of view of the whole changes the view - this chicken produced more for me, cost less, made less trash, caused less pollution, and underwent less pain than I could reasonably argue that 3.25 pounds of inexpensive chicken thighs might have. I got what I paid for.

On Pictures

I've been cooking a lot lately, but the grant writing whirl has kept me from posting. I've taken lots of pictures, so here's a mini post with lots of photos:

(Excuse how horrid they are - I am still learning the camera, and I'm too lazy to really "fix" any of them with photoshop right now.)

Photos of antipasti from the party we had to celebrate the limoncello:


Mozzarella balls from Whole Foods - sweet and nutty


Olives with mustard seed


Pepperocini


Fromage Fort - not Italian, but close enough - it's a mix of hunks of leftover cheeses with white wine, garlic, salt and pepper. This one is mostly goat and bleu cheese, with some dry vermouth. It got good reviews.


Crackers and Sopressata

So, I didn't make any of my antipasti, except the fromage fort, but they were all so very pretty (despite my shoddy camera work), I wanted to share.

Here's the cake I made as a late birthday surprise for John:








It's a yellow cake with lemon curd filling and buttercream icing, as he had requested some weeks before his birthday, and which wasn't able to get done before this party. The cake and icing and curd were all very easy to make, but the day was so warm and humid that they did not want to stay together. I called my mother, very upset that, despite the fact that I can make a layer cake, have done so before, and did everything in my power short of using a dowel to keep this one together, including digging a trough for the curd, it would not stay together. She calmed me down, and reminded me that everything looks fine once it's cut - and sure enough, an hour in the fridge later, the cake cut beautifully, and the guests would have been none the wiser had I not entertained them with the saga.

We actually made two batches of the first round of limoncello, one large batch that steeped with the simple syrup in the freezer, and a very small batch that steeped with the simple syrup outside of the freezer. The small batch was much smoother and thinner than the first, and a little more drinkable, but the colors were wildly different:


Small batch steeped with sugar on the left, original on the right


I also made some new recipes recently. One was this recipe for chicken schnitzel from the NYTimes. I made the salad they suggest, too, and have been making herby salads ever since. I steamed some asparagus along the side:












Finally, a picture of our dinner tonight, made by John, from scratch. He has a favorite pizza dough recipe, and he sliced some mushrooms and some Japanese eggplants (fresh from the farmer's market) very thin. He salted the eggplant for a little while before cooking, then loaded the dough with the mushrooms, the eggplant and sliced garlic atop tomato sauce and mozzarella. It was delicious - the picture does not do it justice.