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Saturday, May 15, 2010

Stay at Home Saturday

When it comes to cooking chicken, I have pretty much always been a scaredy cat. I don’t like to touch skin or bones, and no gross stuff, thank you very much. I mercilessly trim my chicken before I cook it and I only use boneless, skinless breasts. I have never known what to do with other chicken parts, so I’ve stuck with what I know. However, this is an expensive practice! I only buy chicken breasts when they are BOGO (and I stock up to hold me until the next sale), but even then they are almost $3 a pound!

My grocery store has been having specials lately on split chicken breasts. Not nowing what to do with those, I’ve always just avoided them. However, my sister recently enlightened me on a great way to use them and now I’m excited to buy them! She got this method from Mary Ostyn's Family Feasts for $75 a Week. Here’s what you do:

As soon as you get home from the store, stick the chicken in your slow cooker with 2-3 cups of chicken broth. I had to do this in 2 batches over 2 days.


Cover, turn cooker on Low and cook 6-8 hours until the chicken is so tender it falls off the bone. After cooling, start to pick the chicken off of the bone and remove the skin. This is very easy because the chicken is so tender. The skin peels right off.


As I pull the chicken apart, I shred it and put it into containers in about 2 cup proportions. I did 9 chicken breasts and got this much meat (it’s approximately 9 cups):

The best part? The next time I have a recipe that calls for cooked, shredded chicken, all I have to do it go to my freezer and pull some out! Not bad for about 30 minutes of work. The second best part? This chicken was on sale for $.88 a pound!!! I paid about $8 for all of this white meat chicken! Yea!!

If you have any other chicken tips, please share them! But please don’t try to get me to eat dark meat – I’m not that brave yet!

Love,

Amy

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Now, that's GENIUS!!! Even gag prone me can handle that and you can't beat that price w/ a stick. Another reason the crockpot is quickly becoming my BFF. Thanks for sharing!

gmt said...

This is so funny...Micah was reading this post with me and says "see, chicken is easy to cook honey..you don't even have to touch it raw..you should try that tomorrow..." I think he was dropping hints??? Thanks for sharing. I have NEVER bought split breasts but am going to give it a try.

AmyA said...

Gail,
I'm not going to lie - it IS still slightly yucky, even when the chicken is cooked, because you have to pull apart the chicken from the bones and slimy stuff. However, the benefits definitely outweigh the negatives, so I say, "Go for it!" Let me know when you try it!

gmt said...

oh, trust me...I can tell from your pictures it is a yucky process...that's why Micah's comment about it being "easy" was so comical to me. The cost savings is why I am going to give it a whirl!

Ashlie Miller said...

YAY! I gag over chicken, too...Usually just stick to frozen breasts. I bought some chick for 89 cents/pound this week...so I'm gonna give it a whirl.
THANKS!