For Savings You Can Crow About, Get Creative With This Kind of Chicken!

About the cheapest type of meat you can buy is chicken leg quarters bought in five or ten pound bags. I eat a lot of that, even though I don’t like dark meat.

I won’t eat meat from thighs or legs off the bone. I just don’t like the taste. But at 70-80¢ a pound, it’s a good, cheap source of meat. So, I buy it in bulk, cook it enough so I can easily strip it from the bones, then put it in freezer bags and freeze it. (Don’t use the thin-walled plastic bags.)

I currently have about four pounds of such meat in my freezer. With this meat, I will do the following:

• Chop it, cook it on the stove top with barbecue sauce and make myself a chicken-meat sloppy Joe.
• Put some teriyaki sauce in the bag, leave it in the fridge overnight and use it for stir fry.
• Slice it, cook it a few minutes in a little olive oil in a frying pan, add mushrooms, paprika, sour cream and cooked noodles to make chicken stroganoff.
• Cook it the same way except this time add mushrooms, sour cream, grated parmesan cheese and either fresh or thawed, drained frozen spinach, a little basil, and a little garlic powder to make my version of chicken florentine.
• Layer it with spaghetti sauce, cheese and spinach for chicken lasagna.
• Chop it fine in my blender (I have a grate setting) and use it to make chicken spathetti.
• Chop it up, brown it in a pan with a little olive oil, some corn, black beans, onions, a chopped tomato, and a little red chili powder, add some sour cream, then use this mixture to fill steamed tortillas. (Add cheese and a few avocado chunks before you wrap the tortillas.)

In short, if you also don't dig dark meat, just disguise the taste with sauces, spices, herbs or marinades and you can make a number of delicious, meaty dishes….with the meat costing a fraction of what beef, pork or even white-meat chicken would.

Plus, if you precook it in bulk (I'll cook ten pounds worth in the oven) strip off the bones and store it in one-pound bags in the freezer, you'll have meat you can thaw and use in a few minutes. That can cut a surprising amount of time off your cooking, especially if you make double batches and freeze half to create your own microwaveable frozen dinners.

So...save money....save time....with cheap chicken!