Making The Most Of A Chicken

At the moment, chickens really do seem to be very good value. Waitrose (not often thought of as  a bargain supermarket!) are currently running a ‘Half-Price’ campaign across their stores, which does include medium size birds. So a chicken of about 2kg is costing less than £3.50 right now until the end of January! 

So, with a half empty freezer we decided to take full advantage and stock up on as many chickens as we could fit in!

We have kept some whole for roasting – who doesn’t love roast chicken on a Sunday? – and some we have jointed into breast, thighs and drumsticks to give us pieces for a variety of other dishes.

Then we got to wondering how much we had actually saved by jointing the chicken ourselves and when we worked it out the results were quite staggering. 

Three chickens cost us around £9.50 – we chose slightly smaller ones for this purpose. When they were all jointed we weighed the drumsticks, thighs and breasts separately and costed them at the per kilo weight currently charged in Waitrose.

If we had gone and bought the same pieces of chicken already jointed the total cost would have been over £38.00!!! This now makes the chickens even better value for money!

If you fancy having a go at jointing a chicken yourself but don’t know where to start, don’t worry! There is a great little video tutorial from BBC Good Food:

 

Then we had the carcass to deal with. It is such a waste to just throw them away without extracting as much use from them as possible so I put them in my huge stockpot and made the most delicious chicken stock, around 6 litres from 3 chickens – great for making tasty casseroles and also for making the most delicious home made chicken gravy ever tasted! 

Click here for How To Make Chicken Stock 

Click here for the How To Make Home Made Chicken Gravy 

When the stock is made, it is surprising how much meat is still left on the carcass. Now, it takes a bit of time and it is a bit of a fiddle with the small bones, but I took a bit of time to pull the meat from the bones and ended up with about 350g of chicken.

I think this meat in particular would be quite good in a home made chicken soup – after all it’s probably still better than you would get from any tinned soup! – but this time our dog was very lucky and had it as a tasty treat over a couple of days!