Coming home from the grocery store can be a little depressing lately. You cannot believe how much you spent and when you put your groceries away, you still feel like there isn't much to eat in the house.
Now, more than ever, wasting nothing is the goal. This is a way of getting the most out of every penny spent on food.
Oven stuffer roasters can go a long way. I only buy one when they are on sale. Recently my supermarket had them for 79 cents a pound, which is a deal. The one I purchased was almost 7 pounds.
These are so easy to cook. Throw it in the oven and forget about it! You can season it up so many different ways. Had it not threatened to rain we would have smoked this on the grill but doing it indoors is tasty also.
After a meal of delicious roasted chicken there was plenty of meat left for another meal. I removed the meat, put it in a container and even gave some chicken scraps to the cat.
The chicken carcass got put into a pot and put in the refrigerator until the next day.
The weather turned fall-like the next day just in time for chicken soup. I filled the pot with the carcass with water, added about 1 tablespoon chopped garlic (I keep a jar of chopped garlic in the refrigerator to save time) and added some chopped onion.
Onions can go bad if you forget you have them. I like to use my mini-chopped and chop a few onions at a time. I store them in the freezer either in a plastic container or a freezer bag. Whenever I need chopped onion they are ready. This is a big time saver!
I let the soup come to a boil and then simmered for about 1 1/2 hours. I removed the carcass to a bowl and skimmed out any bones that might have fallen off. I added chopped fresh parsley (I keep a pot on my deck) some chopped celery and carrots and a bit of Hungarian paprika, dash of black pepper and the tiniest amount of sea salt.
I let this simmer about 15 minutes and then broke up spaghetti into tiny pieces and added it to the simmering soup. The carcass was cool enough so that I could pick off the rest of the meat and I added that to the soup.
When the spaghetti was almost done I shut off the soup. We got about 3 1/2 quarts of soup from that and it was delicious. No waste!
From that one roaster we got 6 meals! That is just fantastic and makes me feel like I got over on the supermarket.
There are so many ways to use leftover chicken. From salads to casseroles you cannot go wrong.
For more recipe ideas, follow the links on the side to my recipes published on the web.
Fall weather means comfort food and this means stews and soups. These are always an easy way to get more meals for your dollar!
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