Chrabby Meals and Memoirs

I’ve started setting some goals for the kitchen each month and this month’s goal was to cook a whole chicken. As much as I love to cook, this has been daunting to me. Well, after cooking two this month, I am sure this is going to be a regular staple in our household!

The finished product was so tasty.

There are a few reasons I have been wanting to try cooking a whole chicken:

• Cost/quality… being able to buy slightly better quality meat without breaking the bank
• Bones: bone broth is October’s goal, so I set aside the bones for that
• Convenience: having several day’s worth of meat cooked and ready to go proved to be very helpful

One thing I loved about this is that it was incredibly easy and it was some of the best chicken I’ve ever eaten. I roughly followed a basic recipe I found on Pinterest. When it was done, I added some broth, put the lid on the Dutch oven, and let it cook for another hour or two. This made it very tender and easy to take off the bone – it practically fell off the bone.

Side note, I use this Dutch oven just about every day. I almost incorporated “Dutch oven” into the name of this blog because I am such a fan. It’s definitely my favorite kitchen tool.

The recipe called for some fresh herbs as well as lemon and orange. I didn’t use all of these, so I put some of the extra herbs and citrus peels in some vinegar to make some cleaning vinegar – maybe I’ll share what I do with that in a future post.

I used this chicken for white chicken chili – this was it before adding the (dairy free) cream cheese.

And then we ate the rest of it throughout the week and I saved the bones for broth… stay tuned to see how that goes.

I loved the whole chicken so much that I made another one the next week. I used some of that for chicken fried rice. It was so good that I even ate it for breakfast once or twice!

After this month, I’m not sure I’ll be buying packs of chicken breasts again any time soon. I didn’t do a whole analysis on the cost savings, but I know we got a lot more bang for our buck this way and it made my time in the kitchen much more efficient. It also smelled glorious while cooking. If you’ve been trying to find ways to cut costs on groceries and save time in the kitchen, give this a try and let me know how it goes!