Do you ever think that you’d like to cook whole chickens for your family more often, but jeez, that price tag is hard to swallow?
I hear ya, and I hear that quite a bit. What most forget is that it’s simple to get at least 3 meals out of that one chicken, which really makes it quite a bargain!
Let me share with you my favorite ways to get the most out of every chicken!
Starting out I like to cook the whole chicken. You could oven roast it and have a beautiful, delicious meal that your family is sure to love. I personally don’t plan ahead that well... Despite my best attempts, even when I have my meals planned out days in advance, I’m not great at getting things out of the freezer and having them thawed when I need them.
So, what I do is place a whole, frozen chicken, breast down in the Crock-Pot, add 1-2 cups of water and salt. Cook on low for 8-10 hours or so. Sometimes I toss in potatoes and carrots when there are 6-7 hours of cook time left, if you do this when mealtime comes around, there’s very little work to be done, simply dish things up. The broth in the bottom of the pan makes amazing gravy if you’d like.
This first meal we eat just breast meat, and usually not all of it.
We find that a 5-6 lb chicken is just about right for our family of 6 (which includes 4 teenagers now!).
After dinner, I pick off the remaining breast meat. With that, I pack a lunch of leftovers for Brent and set some aside to make chicken salad for me to have for lunch the next day. If you were not packing lunches for the next day, you could easily save this meat to be used in a recipe.
Then I pick all the rest of the meat off the bone and either put it in the fridge to be used in the next day or two or I pop it in the freezer. I’ve found that this leftover meat freezes very well in a wide mouth pint mason jar covered with the broth from the bottom of the pan. Just be sure to leave about 1” headroom to prevent your jar from cracking while freezing.
Once the meat is picked from the bone, toss the bones back into the Crock Pot. Add a few carrots, stalks of celery, an onion cut in quarters, and a few cloves of garlic. Fill almost full with water and cook on low for 24-48 hours.
A day or two later strain the liquid from the bones and veggies and you have some wonderful, rich & tasty bone broth!
Our favorite way to use the leftover chicken and bone broth is either in InstantPot Chicken Casserole or homemade chicken noodle soup. Both of those recipes give us a hearty meal and lunch leftovers for 2-3 people, extra bonus meals!
There are lots of other things you could use the leftover chicken for if you’re not in the mood for casserole or soup. You could make white chicken chili, chicken fried rice, chicken stew, chicken & veggie rice, chicken pot pie, stir fry, add it to salad greens, use it to make BBQ chicken sandwiches, the list goes on and on!
The broth you can use in just about any soup or you can sneak in a little health boost to some favorites like Mac & Cheese and Goulash.
When you think outside the box, and make a plan to make the most of every chicken, you can really stretch that bird pretty far!
Have fun and get creative! Be sure to let me know what your favorite way to use leftover chicken is, I’m always looking for new ideas!