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.

Super Bowl Dip

After many years of cord cutting, we're finally able to watch the Super Bowl at home for the first time in ages. When we realized this, of course, we had to have some food to go along with the game. Pretty much immediately, I thought of the quasi-traditional 7-layer dip that so many people serve. And I asked myself, "How can it make it tastier and more fun?"

Ready to Watch the Super Bowl

I spent a little time thinking about what might comprise the layers in the dip and started making a list of things that individually would be really good with nacho chips.

You can see what I came up with from bottom to top in the photo above:

• Chipotle-Garlic-Bacon Frijoles Refritos. I debated the longest time about what kind of beans to use for the refritos, finally settling on pintos rather than either black beans or mayocobas. Traditionally, beans are refried in lard which I don't have on hand. Rather, I fried up a few slices of bacon and put the cooked pintos, a couple finely chopped chipotles, and rather a large amount of minced garlic into the bacon grease. After I mashed the beans to smooth and cooked them until they separated from the edge of the pan, I chopped the bacon and added it to the beans before seasoning them.

• Salsa Fresca. My fresh salsa is easy to make and delicious, consisting of finely chopped grape tomatoes (in lieu of large tomatoes in the late summer), white onion, cilantro, a finely minced jalapeño, with lime juice and salt to taste.

• Tinga de Pollo. I haven't made this delightful taco filling in a few months and I don't know why as it couldn't be simpler. To prepare it, I place slabs of onion in the bottom of a roasting pan, then layer on a bunch of chicken thighs lightly dusted with a spice mix of New Mexican ground chile, cumin, granulated garlic, salt, and Mexican oregano. The thighs roast until they are done and ready to come off the bone. After they cool, I pick the meat off the bones and add it to half the onion slabs that I have roughly chopped. The other half of the onions goes into the blender with a couple of chipotles en adobo and a small can of tomatoes. After I blitz the sauce, I pour it over the chicken and onion mixture and cook it down until most of the liquid is evaporated to make a delicious taco filling.

• Queso Fundido. Who doesn't like a gooey queso with chips? There are all kinds of ways to make queso fundido (melted cheese) but honestly, the easiest is just to throw some Velveeta and a little milk into the microwave. I added pickled jalapenos and chopped pickled nopalitos to the queso to give it a bit of zing.

• Chorizo. Mexican chorizo may be my favorite taco filling, especially when mixed with eggs. No eggs in this batch of chorizo, however, that I made from pork shoulder, ground Chimayo chile, cumin, garlic, salt, Mexican oregano, and a touch of red wine vinegar for acidity.

• Guacamole. It wouldn't be a Super Bowl dip at all without guacamole. The avocados are tiny now and hard as bricks, so I bought a bunch of them and kept them on the counter for a week to ripen. I made the simplest guacamole ever from avocados, salt, and lime juice, just looking for a nice citrus flavor to lift the rest of the heavy ingredients.

• Cotija Cheese. Grated cotija serves the same role in Mexican cuisine as pecorino does in Italian. I wanted it not only for its white color to serve as a backdrop for the top garnishes, but also to add a bit of saltiness to the dip.

• Top Garnish. The point of gilding this particular lily was to bring to freshness to the rest of the ingredients. On the top, I spooned on the remainder of the salsa fresca and scattered over some sliced green onions. Before topping the whole with a little bouquet of whole cilantro leaves, I used a squeeze bottle to drizzle on a crisscross of thinned chipotle sour cream.

Kelley and Mark

It all started with a random message on Facebook from Kelley last week telling us she missed us. Such is the connectivity or lack thereof in Pocohontas County, WV in the dead zone around NRAO that we are relegated to communicate via FB Messenger. Ann and I have been kicking around the idea of meeting both Kelley and Mark at some halfway point between here and there, about Seneca Rocks, and we mentioned that to her as something we had to do in the spring after they get done with their ski season jobs at Snowshoe.

Long story short, Kelley decided that we needed to do this on Monday and so I cleared my calendar for the 2-hour drive, to hike a little and socialize a lot. But then it turned out that this early in the season, Mark had three days off and they decided to come back to NoVa to attend to some family matters. So they came to our house yesterday late afternoon and stayed for dinner en route to NoVa.

The Three Musketeers

I wanted something really simple for dinner and was thinking about tacos, but I wanted something even less work than that so we could visit and catch up rather than work in the kitchen. I hit on the idea of nachos and then the idea of buying a rotisserie chicken and shredding it on the nachos came to me, so I grabbed a chicken, some grated cheese, and a bag of chips from Costco, and from FoodMaxx some fresh jalapeños, cilantro, a jar of nopalitos, and a can each of black beans and pinto beans.

At home, I drained and rinsed the beans, picked the chicken, pulled the cilantro, and sliced the jalapeños so that at dinner time, all we needed to do was fire up the oven and make some nachos.

Ann Decorating Nachos; Mark Filching Nopalitos

In the photo above, note the so-called "pumpkini," a squash of unknown heritage that Kelley brought along. Most squashes and gourds are somewhat edible and if nothing else, you can generally make soup from them, even if they are super stringy. We got into this one today and found that it has about 1" thick bright orange flesh that is not at all stringy, but it doesn't have any flavor either. It is headed for a squash cream sauce for ricotta gnocchi with chanterelles, rabbit confit, and cavolo nero.

We made two sheet trays of nachos, the first with black beans and the second with pinto beans, between rounds of Cards Against Humanity. A little Prosecco and some red wine might have been drunk. During our match, somebody got the "swooping" card, which none of us could recall ever having encountered before and the reference to which none of us got, so of course, we turned to Urban Dictionary, the arbiter of all things Cards Against Humanity, and found the joke was on us. No spoilers here. Go check for yourself.

Chicken and Pinto Bean Nachos with Nopalitos and Jalapeños

We haven't seen Mark and Kelley since we stayed at their house two Aprils ago and it was just a fantastic short visit to catch up. With my schedule giving me only a single day off a week, opportunities to see them, a 7-hour round trip away, are scarce. We miss them terribly.

Cleaning out the Fridge

It's November. And with that and the inherently shorter days come slower and slower evenings at the restaurant. Making lemonade from lemons, I decided to come home for dinner last evening and let the crew handle the kitchen. For dinner, I would just clean out the fridge and the pantry and throw something together quickly. If nothing else, this certainly keeps my improvisational cooking skills honed and provides at least a little bit of enjoyable mental gymnastics, say, as opposed to the mental gymnastics of capitalizing restaurant equipment or of computing food costs.

But first, a celebratory bottle of wine out on the patio on one of the very last chances this year that we're going to be able to get outside. A good friend brought a bottle of 2005 Rioja Alta Gran Reserva to our paella party on Sunday, and miracle of miracles, it didn't get swilled. So we opened it. And it was shot. All the fruit was gone and nothing left but a lot of sour acid. Damn!

2005 Rioja Alta Gran Reserva: Shot

And so we moved on to one of the last bottles of Fonterosso Chianti, the wine that we brought in for the paella party.

Bright Cherry Chianti

Results of Foraging

After it got too dark and too chilly to sit outside, we brought our glasses of wine inside and I got to work mining the refrigerator and pantry for dinner. I found chicken thighs, mangy green onions, a bit of cilantro, garlic, terribly mangy jalapeños, a half a can of fat free refried beans, a few nopalitos in the bottom of the jar, a tiny can of chopped green chiles, a large can of diced tomatoes, and some leftover paella.

The plan as it formed in my head was to do a quick casserole with rice on the bottom, seared chicken thighs smeared with refried beans on top of that, and a quick tomato sauce over all. 45 minutes in a low (350F) oven should finish the dish.

Paella Rice in the Bottom of Roasting Pan

Searing Floured Chicken Thighs

I found some time ago that refried beans (the no fat ones) are a great way to get some unctuous mouthfeel into a dish without adding any cream or fat. Once baked with the chicken, you hardly know that they are there, but the dish becomes rich and satisfying without being overly unhealthy.

Chicken Thighs Coated with Refried Beans

The sauce was everything left. I drained the tomatoes, chiles, and nopalitos and then added those to a sauté of green onions, garlic, cilantro stems, and sliced jalapeños. I had to add a touch of water to bring the sauce together and after cooking for three or four minutes, I adjusted the seasoning with some salt and a splash of Sherry vinegar (the tomatoes didn't have enough acidity) and poured the sauce over the chicken.

Refrigerator Sauce

Oven Ready

This turned out to be a super delicious and super filling dinner. My improvisational cooking skills still seem to be intact!

Seven-Layer Dip Bowl

Delicious and Healthy, Too!

This cold wet weather is not helping the restaurant business one bit, but it is giving me more time at home with Ann, so that's something of a win, no? Last night was another in a long series of slow week nights and so I decided to go home and make dinner for us. It's no secret that Ann and I are slowly trying to work off all that winter weight we put on and so we are being a bit more selective in what we eat.

We haggled a bit on the phone over dinner, throwing out one idea after another. It all kept coming back to the thawed ground turkey in the fridge. It finally dawned on me that we could do a really healthy version of the horribly unhealthy seven-layer dip, yet put it in a bowl so that we could eat it without the usual tortilla chips.

The layers are up to you, but I avoided the cheese and sour cream in my bowl because of my lactose intolerance. Ann went for both from her stash in the fridge. This is not a quick or haphazard meal. Between vegetable prep and milling spices and adding cook time for the beans and the turkey, this was a solid 30 minutes of work, even for a very quick professional chef.

The bottom layer for both of us was ground turkey which I added to a sauté of onions, poblanos, and garlic and cooked until just done through. Then I seasoned with salt, cumin, ancho powder, oregano, and the barest hint of cinnamon. A spice mill really helps. Get one. Keep your spices and chile peppers fresh and rotated and mill them to order. It does make a difference.

For the beans, the second layer, I opted for something texturally between soup beans (frijoles de la olla) and refried beans (frijoles refritos). I started by draining a large can of cooked pintos: I love to rehydrate dry beans overnight, but that's not a possibility much of the time, especially on a day when I didn't anticipate being home for dinner. Canned beans aren't as economical or even as tasty as dried beans, but they sure are one of life's great convenience foods and there's no shame at all in using them.

In the bean pot, I started  a sauté of diced onion, diced poblano, minced garlic, and minced cilantro stems. Once this cooked down for a bit, in went the beans, about two ounces of the adobo off a can of chipotles, salt, and water to cover. I cooked the beans in parallel with the turkey. Once the turkey was done, I moved the beans to the high burner and brought them down rapidly. Towards the end, I smashed some beans against the side of the pot with my spoon and this thickened the sauce quite quickly. I finished them like refried beans, cooking them while stirring often, until the beans started to pull away from the side of the pot.

On top of the turkey and beans, I layered chipotle salsa, halved grape tomatoes, nopalitos, green onions, and topped the whole thing with cilantro. Cubes of avocado and fresh, raw sweet corn would be great in this, in season.

This dish has it all: extremely tasty, high protein, low fat, high fiber, and has only complex carbs in the beans. It's a winner even if you doctor it with a bit of cheese, sour cream, or both.

Red or Green?

Chile is so important to New Mexican cuisine that New Mexico has an official state question: "Red or Green?" I spent a bunch of time in that beautiful state back in my teens and early 20's and I came to love dishes smothered in chile. My answer to the question: Green! I don't dislike red chile in any way, but I love the nuance that I am able to impart to green chile and we often have chile verde and salsa verde on the menu at the restaurant because of that.



Fried Tortillas with Beans, Poached Eggs, and Chile Verde

Yesterday was an early day for me (home by 2pm) and that let me tackle a more complex dinner than I would have with less time. My ladies at the grocery store perked up a little when they saw what I was buying, probably because they recognized all the ingredients in my basket. I usually have all kinds of Asian ingredients that they can't relate to, but yesterday's haul of pork neck bones, pinto beans, corn tortillas, tomatillos, and cilantro prompted the inevitable questions about what I was making for dinner.

And I told them that I was making a version of huevos rancheros with salsa verde instead of salsa ranchera and poached eggs instead of fried. It was Ann who got me thinking along these lines and I am glad she did because last night's dinner was AWESOME!

Broiling Poblanos, Tomatillos, and Garlic

When I first got home, I wanted to get the stock for the chile verde going so that it could simmer and do its thing while Ann and I went out on the patio and enjoyed the unseasonably warm temperatures. The first step was to put poblano chiles, tomatillos, and whole peeled cloves of garlic on a sheet tray under the broiler on high. I turned the poblanos once when they had blistered on the first side and then removed the sheet tray from the oven once the second side had blistered. Into a plastic bag with the poblanos so that they could steam a bit and into the stock with the garlic and tomatillos.

Putting a Hard Sear on Pork Neck Bones, Onion, and Cilantro Stems

I got a shallow stock pot really hot on the stove and put in the pork neck bones to get a good, hard sear. To this I added half a large yellow onion, cut into chunks, with the skin still on, and all the stems from a bunch of cilantro. After turning the neck bones until they were well caramelized on all sides, I added water to cover and brought it to a simmer. In went the roasted garlic and tomatillos, along with an avocado leaf, and all bubbled away for a couple hours.

The Secret to Awesome Frijoles Refritos: Bacon, Onion, and Garlic

Just before dinner, I made some refried beans. Well, I cheated. I decided that on a non-weekend night with limited time and limited patience for dirty dishes that I just wasn't up to cooking beans from scratch, so I bought a big can of already cooked and roughly mashed pinto beans, knowing that I could doctor them and make them awesome. When buying pre-prepared ingredients such as this, something I almost never do, I always check the ingredients to know exactly what I am buying. In this case: pinto beans, lard, and salt. Perfect.

You can see in the photo above that I finely chopped some bacon, the other half of the onion that I used in the stock, and some garlic and slowly sweated it down. To this I added the beans and water and seasoned with salt as necessary.

The Green Pork Stock Before Thickening

To make the chile verde, I removed the neck bones to a plate to cool, and fished out the avocado leaf, the onion skins (which float), and any tough tomatillo skins that I could grab with my tongs. In went the immersion blender and I blended it smooth as you see above. At this point, I picked what meat I could off the neck bones and peeled, seeded, and chopped the four roasted poblanos. Into the pan went the poblanos and pork and I turned up the flame to get a low boil. I then whisked in a scant quarter of a cup of masa harina and let it cook another five minutes to slightly thicken the sauce. The chile verde wanted a good bit of salt at this point, not having been seasoned at all during cooking (and this is always a good idea with highly reduced sauces: season after the reduction, not before!).

Ann joined me in the kitchen and helped fry the tortillas and slice an avocado while I poached us two eggs apiece. And from there, it was just a tiny bit of assembly: frijoles refritos down on the plate, two tortillas over, two poached eggs over that, chile verde over all, and a scattering of green onions and cilantro on top. OMG, so awesome!!