I usually make chicken noodle soup it using chicken leg portions, however, as I was shopping for the chicken, I realised that there was a huge price difference between leg portions and a whole chicken: That week, a whole chicken was $11.15 per kilogram, and the leg portions were $15.38 per kilogram. The price for the package of chicken legs was cheaper than the whole bird, but the unit price showed that a whole chicken was actually cheaper. Also, a whole chicken had greater weight, and that meant more meals.
I bought the chicken a few days before the coronation, and I considered making roast chicken that night, but I made it the following Tuesday. I also made mashed potatoes from some I had on hand and a carrot dish (in both cases, the vegetables needed to be used up). I also made gravy from scratch.
The carrot dish was based on a Jamie Oliver recipe I’d made seven or eight years ago—but I had to improvise. The original recipe (which I can’t find…) called for pared peel and the juice of one orange—and I forget the rest. It didn’t matter, though, because the oranges I had were mummified.
So, I adapted a different Jamie Oliver recipe I found on one his cookbooks that I have. That called for chilli, and at first I was taken aback—I don’t like hot things. Then, I thought about it. So, I used about a tablespoon or two of mango chutney I had in the fridge, mixed in some Thai-style sweet chilli sauce (a couple teaspoons, maybe) and a good glop of honey (I think I’d have preferred brown sugar), and a couple tablespoons of butter. Then I put it in a pan, put foil over it and baked it in the oven with the chicken for about an hour. The result was a combination of savoury and sweet (similar to, though different from, the original), and it also had a bit of a kick like I imagine the newer recipe must have. I liked it—and I wish I’d written down exactly what I did…
The next night, Wednesday, I made chicken on toast with the leftover gravy, and the leftover carrots on the side. I gave myself quite a lot of chicken.
Thursday morning, I picked meat off the bones, and made scrambled eggs with chicken on toast for my breakfast (photo below). I also put the carcass in water and boiled it to make a stock, and also to get the last of the meat off the bones (there was still quite a bit of meat on them).
Thursday evening, I made the soup with the stock I’d made (supplemented with some low-salt stock powder), a couple small onions I wanted to use up, and some frozen veggies, which I always have on hand, plus some small celery sticks I bought fresh—a small extravagance, maybe, but I like celery in my chicken soup, and if I buy a whole bunch I have trouble getting through it all before it starts to go off. I didn’t have any fresh carrots on hand because I used them up the first night.
The soup was really nice—maybe even my best chicken noodle soup yet. I didn’t price it out, though, because apart from the chicken and a few cents worth of fresh celery, everything was stuff I had on hand and needed to use up before it spoiled. Even so, I’m confident that each of the four meals I made cost less than $4 each, especially because on Friday I had a very large serving of leftover soup for lunch. This was actually “against my better judgement” because this was three and half days after I roasted the chicken, and normally my absolute limit is three days, tops; I took a chance and won, but I wouldn’t suggest that to others (or myself, for that matter).
This a;; started because I realised that a whole chicken was significantly cheaper than chicken legs, even more so because it could make so many more meals. This got me to wonder, how many more meals could I save on by combining and thinking sort of longitudinally?
When I’ve looked into meal planning in the past as I tried to be more frugal, but the advice has mainly been for families, which makes sense. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any advice for couples, but I’ve definitely never seen any advice for people living alone. I don’t know that I can help with that latter void, but if I can, I’ll definitely share the results.
At the very least, I do enjoy the adventure. That, and the accidentally frugal meals.
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| The garnish is dried parsley from my garden. |
There are two sentences here that caught my attention. "I gave myself quite a lot of chicken." This suggests an interesting duality. It seems that *I* is the regulator and *myself* is the one being regulated. Or maybe *I* thought *myself* was being good and thrifty and deserved more chicken. Or I'm reading too much into things.
ReplyDeleteThe other: "I bought the chicken a few days before the coronation." I initially read it as casual. The chicken was purchased BECAUSE of the coronation. Intellectually, I realized you were using the coronation as a reference point for time. But maybe Kiwis are always supposed to have chicken for a coronation?
That's so interesting! Both possibilities for that duality are correct, though there was a third aspect: I wasn't being a glutton, no, because "I" had served "myself" quite a lot of chicken. I sometimes deliberately use ambiguous wording so readers can make their own meaning, something I enjoy doing with other people's writing—unless specificity is important for meaning.
ReplyDeleteYou're quite right: The reference was only for time, however: I originally thought I'd make Coronation Chicken for that day (NOT the Coronation Quiche), and I had chicken for either option in the freezer. However, on the night I realised that I didn't have all the ingredients for either Coronation dish, and while I could have made a substitute or two, there were too many missing pieces for either.
It was at this point that I seriously considered roasting the chicken, which I really had only bought so I could make soup at some point. So, it almost became "Accidentally causal", too, except that it was too late in the day by that point, and I didn't feel like roast chicken that night, anyway. Instead, I got a pizza out of the freezer and had that. Not exactly very "authentic"—a curry would've arguably been the best choice if something relevant to the modern UK was what I was going for.
Language choice is made of tales to tell, too, apparently.