recession challenge: dinner for two all week from one chicken

ingredients:

• one whole chicken (i paid ~$9)
• 1 bag frozen veggie blend (i paid ~$2 for tj's organic foursome)
• 3 potatoes (i paid ~$1.15 for huge ones)
• 1 stick butter (negligible, i guess it cost me ~$0.75)
• 1.5 cups flour (negligible)
• splash of milk or cream (whatever you have)
• mirepoix (i paid ~$3, or you could chop up your own onions, carrots & celery)
• 1 pound egg noodles (i paid ~$1)
• vodka (or ice-cold water... you see where this is going right?)
• sea salt & fresh ground pepper

(see, i paid about $20, give or take, for the ingredients to feed us dinner for a week. recession-friendly! we also spend about $20 a week on produce and $15 on lunch-foods.)

prep:

• chill 1/2 the butter and the vodka/water

actual cooking (meal 1):

• roast the chicken, seasoned with s&p and rubbed with butter for 20 minutes per pound at 350*
• cube & boil 2 potatoes, skin on, until softish
• drain potatoes
• add 2-3 tablespoons butter & milk to potatoes, mash
• season to taste with salt & pepper
• nuke 1/3-1/2 the frozen veggies

actual cooking (meal 2):

• heat chicken drippings & 1/2 cup flour on medium heat, whisk until smooth, add hot water to desire thickness
• pick carcass of usable meat, set aside
• use carcass to make broth
• use chilled butter, 1 cup flour and chilled vodka/water to make pie crust
• nuke 1 potato, chill & cube
• combine gravy, frozen veggies, cubed potato, 1/3-1/2 the chicken pieces in a lightly greased casserole
• cover with crust, pierce & bake at 375* until golden brown

actual cooking (meal 3):

• use mirepoix, broth, noodles, remaining chicken & remaining veggies to make soup

meal 1 is a one-shot deal. meal 2 we haven't eaten yet, but we expect it to last 2 or 3 dinners. meal 3 should also last 2 or 3 dinners. of course, this is all dependant on how much you eat. it's not magic, ya know.

editied to add:

with the addition of a very hungry j to our meal 2 dinner, it lasted one night, and i would have known that if i hadn't blogged this meal right before we had the idea to invite him. but... since i hadn't added the rest of the frozen veggies to the soup (because i hadn't thought of it yet) and we had an onion, rice & eggs laying around the house, i managed to squeeze another pantry meal out with some yum veggie fried rice, with frozen egg rolls (also a stock pantry item in my home... don't judge).

chicken noo-noos

this recipe was developed for j, who says that chicken noodle soup is "THE DEVIL" and has some choice things to say about chicken broth in particular, i believe.

ingredients:

• 1-4 chicken breasts, depending on how into meat you are
• 2 quarts chicken broth
• mirepoix
• 1 pound egg noodles, medium or wide, but not small (and, seriously, you can't just throw pasta in there and call them noodles. NOODLES are not PASTA.)
• sea salt & ground pepper
• 1/8 cup cold water
• 1/8 cup cornstarch (or flour, i think flour might work)

prep:

• boil the chicken in broth until past done
• chill until cool to the touch
• (chop up a large onion, a couple carrots and some celery if you didn't buy your prechopped mirepoix from trader joe's)
• shred chicken with fingers or forks

actual cooking:

• lightly saute mirepoix in the bottom of your soup pot
• add broth and bring to a boil
• add chicken & noodles (yup, all of them)
• boil as long as the noodle package says to (8 minutes, i think?)
• season to taste
• mix together cold water & cornstarch (this part is key-- it won't work if you just dump them both in the pot! and make sure it's not lumpy... nobody wants a lump of cornstarch.)
• add water/starch to boiling soup and stir
• boil for at least 2 minutes or until soup reaches desired thickness

this will be even thicker the next day-- more like a casserole than a stew. in fact, i won't blame you if you want to bake it with some breadcrumbs or crushed chips on top. yum.

duck a la' half-ass

"i think," i said, possibly before i even really had the thought, "i'll make a duck for christmas!" and then... it was. that was sometime in mid-november. i ignored the plan for about a month and then decided it was time to purchase the duck. (duck? is expensive. wow. the little 6-pound bugger i bought ran me $18! and you gotta figure, with a duck, about two and a half pounds of that was fat the just dripped off. but i digress.) so, i went to the "real" supermarket-- which is less intimidating than a butcher or a farmer's market where i might see feathers or something-- and snagged a frozen duckling.

all eating ducks are apparently ducklings. i discovered that in my internet research after the joy of cooking offered options for trussing and de-boning "the bird." also? they're mostly farm-raised, to the extent that you could call a thing that lived on average eight weeks having been raised. because they're mostly farm-raised, they're mostly not super fatty like wild duck, if you buy them frozen in the supermarket, at least. because they're not super-fatty, you do not have to prick the skin, no matter what your grandmother insists.

so, this is how i cooked the duck.

ingredients:

• a duck
• oil spray
• salt

prep:

• defrost the duck
• dump the blood, guts, neck and orange sauce packet out of the duck
• (call somebody to brag that you just handled duck guts on freaking christmas!)
• place duck breast-up on a roasting pan
• spritz with oil, sprinkle with salt
• preheat the oven to temperature prescribed on duckling packaging

actual cooking:

• put the duck in the oven
• follow directions on duckling packaging
• cook until duckling reached 180 degrees in the thigh joint
• warm up orange sauce
• move duck to a new plate and cut into edible pieces (note: the wings aren't worth a damn and the legs aren't worth much more. also: the whole damn bird is dark meat.)
• serve with orange sauce (the one that came out of the duck's, ahem, cavity.)

a duck, as a main course, will serve about a person and a half, maybe two. i served duck alongside ham, garlic smashed red potatoes, cornbread stuffing with onions, lima beans, roasted broccoli & cauliflower, brussel sprouts with bacon and rosemary bread.