One Chicken, Three Meals

I've been wondering a lot recently about how to help people who don't have a lot of money make meals economically. What I see at the grocery store really causes me pause: almost all carts of groceries contain extremely expensive pre-prepared and probably not very nutritious foods, while very few carts actually contain items designed to be cooked into healthy meals.

I haven't really made any headway in figuring out how to help such people, but I thought I'd share how I put three dinners for two on the table for about $20. It all started with a single chicken, a 6-pound behemoth for which I paid $8.

Meal 1: Roasted Chicken and Roasted Asparagus

Roasted Chicken

This is as simple as dinner can get. I rubbed the entire chicken with olive oil and sprinkled it with salt and fresh thyme leaves. I put it on a sheet tray into the oven and cooked it until the thighs came up to 165 degrees in the thickest part, about 90 minutes in the oven at 375F.

When the chicken was done, I left it to stand on the stove while I put another sheet tray of asparagus drizzled with a little oil and salt into the oven. We ate the thighs, legs, and asparagus about 20 minutes later.

Additional cost for this meal $2.50: big bundle of asparagus: $2.50; fresh thyme, salt, olive oil: pennies

After dinner, I collected all the roasting juices from the chicken pan by adding a bit of hot water to it and then pouring it into a container. These juices were for soup later on. I sliced 3 nice slices off each breast and saved them for crunch wraps the next night. I also saved the bones from the legs and thighs as well as the chicken carcass for soup.

Meal 2: Chicken Tinga and Chipotle Refried Bean Crunch Wraps

Chicken Tinga and Chipotle Refried Bean Crunch Wraps

Using the leftover slices of chicken breast, I made crunch wraps with a layer each of chipotle refried beans, chicken breast in tinga sauce, and cheese.

To make the refried beans, I sweated an onion, finely diced, in oil until translucent. I put half the onion in the blender for the tinga sauce. To the remaining onion in the pan, I added two 14-ounce cans of drained and rinsed pinto beans. Then I added the tiniest pinch of Mexican oregano and one chipotle pepper, super finely minced. I added a touch of water to get things cooking and as everything cooked, I mashed the beans with the back of my wooden spoon. When the beans became tight, I turned of the heat.

To make the tinga sauce, I added to the onions in the blender a drained 14-ounce can of tomatoes, a chipotle, a pinch of Mexican oregano, and a pinch of salt. After blending this briefly using a couple of pulses of the blender, I added the sauce to a small pan on the stove where I heated it gently and reduced it to remove any excess water.

When I was ready to assemble the crunch wraps, I put the chicken breast slices in the warm sauce to reheat. Then I built the crunch wraps with a layer of beans, then the chicken slices, then a scant half cup of grated cheddar cheese. I mixed the leftover tinga sauce into the unused beans and had that for lunch the next day. See this post for the crunch wrap technique.

Additional cost for this meal $4.25: 2 cans pintos; $1.25, 1 can tomatoes: $1; tortillas: $0.50; onion $0.50; cheese: $1; 2 chipotles, Mexican oregano: pennies

These crunch wraps are actually massive and could stretch for two meals. After eating my entire one for dinner, I did not eat breakfast the next day, being still sated from dinner.

Meal 3: Chicken and Stars Soup

Chicken and Stars Soup

One of the primary reasons that I roast chickens is to have the carcass leftover for soup. I put into a soup pot the carcass, the leftover roasting juices, a couple sprigs of thyme, a quart of chicken stock, the ends of five carrots, the outer leaves of a leek (saved for soup from a meal earlier in the week), and the frilly leaves from a bunch of celery. After topping the carcass and vegetables with water, I put a low flame under it and went for a 90-minute walk.

When I came back, I turned the pot off and removed all the solids from the stock. After the chicken cooled, I picked all the meat from the bones (the remaining breast meat, the wings, and the oysters in the back) and saved it, pitching the bones and veggie scraps.

I cut one onion, four large carrots, and four stalks of celery into large pieces and put them in the stock and let them cook for an hour. When we were ready to eat, I brought the soup to a rolling boil and added a small 200g bag of pasta stars (estrellas, stelline) and the chicken meat and cooked the pasta for ten minutes.

Additional cost for this meal $5.25: chicken stock: $1.50; pasta: $0.75; onions, carrots, celery: $3

If I were on a budget, I would not have added the chicken stock, but soup is always better if you make a double stock from stock and bones rather than a single stock from water and bones. After two bowls of soup apiece, we had two additional bowls leftover for lunch.

Bottom Line

For these three meals for two, I spent right at $20. As a bonus, we had three lunches from the leftovers, all from a single chicken. I'm always thinking when I am shopping for groceries items that I can cook for one dinner and have leftovers to repurpose for another dinner.