Category Archives: chicken

What Happens When You Overfill a Crockpot with 5(ish) Ingredients

chicken, Soup,

Do you have any idea how hard it is to start off a post? Normally, I just start with “Hi!” or “Hello!” But that seems so bland. And I shouldn’t be bland for a cooking blog, right?

Whatever.

Anyway, hello! Or something.

A couple days ago, I made a variation on my usual Chicken Soup. This time, I made it in the slowcooker. And with a bit too much of (almost) everything. It is excellent!

And it only need 5(ish) ingredients.

Recipe

  1. Chicken. I used a package of drumsticks, and a package of thighs. So, call it about 15-20 pieces of chicken. This was more than my poor slow-cooker crock-pot could hold. Oh well. It was quite tasty! And I have a lot of leftovers! Some of it didn’t get completely submerged, so it turned into roasted chicken rather than boiled. (Not too much, though.)
  2. Onion. I’m guessing I used about a pound. It probably would have been about 1.5 regular sweet onions. However, the place I went to buy food is awesome, and I got about 3 pounds of onion in 2 onions. So, I used about 3/4 of one onion. Hence, guesstimating about a pound.
  3. 1 Tablespoon of salt
  4. 4 cups of water.
  5. Carrots. (About 1/2-1/3 of a pack of baby carrots…?)
  6. Optional: A sprinkling of lemon juice.

Directions

  1. Lay the onions on the bottom of the crock pot.
  2. Remove as much of the skin as reasonable from your chicken. This helps make your soup not too greasy. It may also help you stack more in vertically…
  3. Pour on the salt
  4. Pour in as much of the water as you can. Be sure to hit the salt, so that the seasoning will be absorbed in all the soup.
  5. Wedge the carrots on top. If you can get them into the liquid, that will help flavor the soup. So, try for that insofar as possible.
  6. Cover, and cook on low for about 10-12 hours. (This gives you a really rich, excellent broth!)
  7. Enjoy. (And maybe freeze some of your leftovers so that they don’t go bad in your refrigerator. Depending on how many people you’re feeding with the soup.)
Overfilled crockpot of chicken soup
THIS is what to much of 5 ingredients looks like. 🙂
Very thick chilled chicken broth.
You can tell it’s good, because it gels QUITE nicely.

Roast Chicken Drumsticks

About A Buck, chicken,

Hi!

Tonight, I once more made a dinner with chicken drumsticks. (They’re still inexpensive.)

For the recipe tonight, instead of making soup, I roasted them with a bit of seasoned butter. They turned out quite nicely.

Ingredients

  1. Chicken drumsticks (Skin on)
  2. 2-3 Tbsp Butter (I used salted this time, and therefore did not include more salt in the recipe)
  3. 2-3 cloves of garlic (minced) (1 clove per Tbsp of butter)
  4. 1 tbsp(ish) lemon juice
  5. Large pinch of Basil
  6. Larger sprinkle of Parsley
  7. 2 Shakes of paprika (separated)

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to about 425 f.
  2. Soften butter
  3. Mix butter with the garlic, lemon juice, and herbs
  4. Rinse chicken, pat dry, place in a baking pan.
  5. Put seasoned butter underneath the skin of the chicken, and on top
  6. Sprinkle the chicken with more lemon juice and a touch more paprika
  7. Bake until chicken is thoroughly prepared (juices run clear, internal temperature appropriate, etc. For me, I cooked it for about an hour. That may have been overkill. But it worked.)
  8. Enjoy! I also cooked up some rotini to go with.

I accidentally made savoury Jello, and it’s good.

About A Buck, chicken, Soup, ,

Hello!

So, the other day, I decided to make chicken soup. It turned out nicely. It turned out so nicely, in fact, that it turned to jello when I refrigerated it. (That’s apparently one of the signs of a really well-done chicken stock. It has something to do with getting all the flavor from the chicken bones, and chicken bones being a common basis for gelatin and stuff.)

But, yeah. It made a good soup. And it can be reheated from its jello form into soup. So, here’s the recipe.

Chicken Soup / pre-Savoury-Jello

Ingredients

  1. 3-4 pounds of drumsticks. These should be really inexpensive. (I paid about $0.69  a pound.) I actually initially made the soup because I wanted the drumsticks. The fact that the soup turned out so well was an added bonus! This ended up being about 12-14 drumsticks. (I’m not entirely sure. I miscounted a few times. And it doesn’t really matter…) Price (rounded): $3
  2. 1 medium sweet onion, sliced. Call it about $1.
  3. Carrots. (I used about a third-bag of baby carrots, since I eat those for snacks anyway, and didn’t want to deal with peeling and chopping and stuff.) Call it about $0.50
  4. Salt to taste
  5. Water.
  6. (Optional: some lemon juice, other seasonings.)

Instructions

First some pre-instructions.

  1. Remove the skin from some of the drumsticks. (Semi-optional. This makes it a bit easier for the skimming later on.)
  2. Slice the onions.

In whatever size pot you have that will hold your ingredients and let you fill it with water so that it won’t boil over…

  1. Place the drumsticks in the pot.
  2. Cover with water. (Make sure the drumsticks are all covered.)
  3. Put in onions, carrots, and salt.
  4. Bring to a rolling boil, stirring occasionally.
  5. Skim the surface as you go. (Lots of stuff from the skin and stuff will come up to the top. It increases the chance of boil-overs.) Be careful to leave the onions and carrots in.
  6. Let it continue to boil until the chicken is fully cooked. Yes, some recipes call for it to simmer. It probably turns out better. I don’t know. But this is what I’ve done, and it still tastes good. And it gets done in generally between 20 and 40 minutes. You’ll know it’s either done, or close to being done, when the meat starts falling off the bones.
  7. If you’re like me, let it continue to boil for another 3-5 minutes, just to be extra sure.
  8. Remove the chicken from the pot, for easier access to the broth.
  9. Skim the fat and stuff. (Or wait to do that the next day after it’s refrigerated, and have a really rich soup that night. My default. Especially as I do skim some of the stuff with a large spoon as I go.)
  10. Serve it up, and enjoy. Depending on how much water you use, you should get at least 4 meals out of it. And lots of snacks with the drumsticks.
A pile of chicken drumsticks.
This is (part of) what $3 can get you. 🙂

Blue-Pineapple Stuffed Chicken

chicken

Hello!

Today’s main dish was pretty excellent, if a bit different from what I usually do. And it’s also probably a bit more expensive than you’d normally want. But I am surprised by how much I liked it.

I made a Blue cheese & Pineapple Stuffed Chicken Breast for dinner.

Ingredients

I made a single (boneless, skinless) breast worth. You can (probably) adapt this fairly easily.

  1. A boneless, skinless chicken breast. I used a fairly large one.
  2. About 1/4 cup Pineapple. (I used canned.)
  3. About 1/8 cup blue cheese crumbles. (I did not measure this.)
  4. About 1/8 cup bread crumbs, plus more for sprinkling.
  5. Herbs & spices. (I used parsley, basil, paprika, and salt.)

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to about 400 F.
  2. Line an appropriately sized baking dish with aluminum foil to minimize cleanup. Put a touch of oil and some seasonings onto the bottom. (Optional.)
  3. Slice the chicken (not all the way through) so that you can stuff it. (You want to have a cavity you can fill.)
  4. Mix together pineapple, blue cheese, herbs and spices, and bread crumbs in a small bowl. The consistency should not be too liquidy. If it is, add more bread crumbs. Or blue cheese. Or both. 🙂
  5. Stuff the stuffing into the chicken. (You may want to put the chicken in the baking dish before stuffing. Up to you.)
  6. Sprinkle the chicken with herbs and more breadcrumbs. (This gives the chicken a bit of extra flavor and crunch.)
  7. Bake until chicken is thoroughly cooked.
  8. Take a picture.  (Optional.)

    Blue cheese slightly breaded chicken
    Dinner. Yum. 🙂
  9. Enjoy

REALLY good baked chicken meal

"Gourmet", $1.50, chicken, ,

Hi there!

Once more I made a chicken dinner thingy. (Big surprise, right?)

Chicken, Buttered Rice, Spinach, and Semi-Pita Bread.
Chicken, Buttered Rice, Spinach, and Semi-Pita Bread. Yum!

This one took a bit of time to prepare. As in, I marinated the chicken all day. So, plan on that, if you wish.

Other Things

Spinach

Ingredients

  1. A handful of spinach. More than you think you want, and it’ll still be less. I used probably about $0.20 worth of fresh spinach.
  2. 1 Tbsp Onion (negligible cost)
  3. About 1/2 tbsp butter (my roommate has non-stick pans that I get to use. 🙂 The butter is for flavor.) (about $0.05).

Directions

  1. Cook onions in butter until onions are tender
  2. Put the spinach in until cooked and heated.

Easy, right?

Rice

Cook according to directions. Add a bit of salt to the water, and then after it’s done, add about 1 tsp of butter. Probably about $0.25. This is a totally and completely random guess, though, and probably waaay overestimated.

Pita

I used this recipe. Use a bit less salt than it calls for, though. By probably 1/8-1/4. (I made it according to a half-recipe, and baked it in the oven.) According to my rough calculations, the pita cost about $0.15. Probably a bit less.

Chicken

Ingredients

  1. About 1/4 LB chicken, or one chicken piece like the one shown above. (About $0.55)
  2. Almost 1/2 cup milk (about $0.15)
  3. 1/2 TBSP lemon juice, plus a little extra for later (negligible cost.)
  4. 2 cloves garlic (I really don’t know… I misplaced how much the bulbs cost. Probably quite negligible, though.)
  5. 1/2 tsp Salt + a bit. (Negligible.)
  6. Parsley, Basil, Oregano (Negligible)
  7. 1/2 TBSP Oil (negligible)

Directions

In a small bowl, mix together the milk and 1/2 TBSP lemon juice. Let stand for at least 5 minutes. This makes fake buttermilk.

Then, combine the fake buttermilk with the salt, garlic, parsley, basil, and oregano. I used more parsley than basil, and more basil than oregano. Basically, until it looks seasoned…

Next put the chicken into the marinade and coat it. Sprinkle a little more salt on. (I’d heard that it helps pull the marinade/stuff in. And it seemed to work!) Let it sit in the refrigerator for the day.

If you can, you might want to turn it occasionally throughout the day and re-coat. I happened to come home early today, so it worked for me, but it shouldn’t be necessary.

When you’re ready to cook the chicken:

  1. Preheat the oven to 425 f.
  2. Transfer chicken (and about 1TBSP of the extra marinade) to a small casserole dish to cook in.
  3. Put the 1/2 TBSP oil into the pan, drizzling it over the chicken, and then into the excess marinade.
  4. Turn the chicken a couple of times to coat.
  5. Bake for about 12 minutes. Check the readiness, and (in theory) turn over the chicken. (I forgot to turn it over… I knew there was a reason I underdid the amount of time! Oh well…)
  6. Bake for about another 7 minutes. However, because of the moisture you’ve pulled into the chicken, an extra minute or two won’t hurt it. At least, it didn’t hurt mine, so yours should be good.

There you go!

Total cost of the meal: $0.70 for the chicken, $0.15 for the bread, no more than $0.25 for the rice, and about $0.25 for the spinach. Total cost: $1.35. Maximum. Not bad, right?

EXCELLENT baked biscuit-breaded chicken strips

chicken

Hi there!

Tonight I did a fair bit of pre-cooking for the week. (I took the thawed part of a couple of huge chicken breasts, and turned that into chicken strips which I then breaded and stuck in the oven.) I tried one of the strips, and I really like the way it turned out!

Biscuit-breaded Baked Chicken

I’m afraid I don’t have time to do the cost analysis, but I’m quite sure it’s a fairly inexpensive recipe. I’d guess probably no more than $1.50 a serving. It took a bit of time, since I made my own biscuits from scratch, but from what I’ve tried it’s sooo worth it. So, for any breaded chicken recipe that I do, there are generally about

three main steps

  1. Preparing the breading/coating
  2. Preparing the chicken to bake
  3. Baking the chicken.

And for this, there are three main things that get mixed together in step 2. They are

  1. breading/coating
  2. liquidy-stuff
  3. chicken

The chicken requires minimal preparation. Cut it into appropriately sized strips or chunks. Really, it’s entirely up to you. It’s in the liquidy-stuff and the breading/coating where things get fun!

Breading/Coating/Dry-Stuff

For this, I first baked some biscuits this afternoon. I pretty much used the Allrecipe Kentucky Biscuits Recipe, except that since I didn’t have buttermilk, I used a substitute.

Buttermilk Substitute

Ingredients
  1. 1 cup minus 1 TBSP milk
  2. 1 TBSP lemon juice

Mix them together, and let them stand. I found it online somewhere, and I’m afraid I’ve lost the link… I’ve been told that buttermilk is what makes biscuits flaky, and that this achieves the effect. The biscuits were flaky, so I’m guessing it worked.

Note: Even though the biscuit recipe calls for only 3/4 cup buttermilk, make the whole cup of substitute. You’ll use it later.

But back to the breading/stuff. I used a majority of my freshly baked biscuits (since they were a bit more bland than I wanted) and turned them into breadcrumbs. I’d say I probably used about 1/2-2/3 of the biscuits, and made somewhere between 1 & 2 cups of crumbs.

So, actually, here are the

Breading/Coating/Dry-Stuff Ingredients

  1. Biscuit crumbs. (1-2 cups.)
  2. salt to taste
  3. 2 cloves garlic
  4. parsley
  5. basil
  6. More parsley
  7. oregano

Basically, mix all those up. Season to taste. I’m afraid I can’t help you with the precise amount of the ingredients, since I seldom actually measure herbs… I used probably about a large pinch of each. (A very large pinch for the parsley.)

The liquidy-stuff you dip your chicken in

Ingredients

  1. 1/4 cup Buttermilk Substitute
  2. Some oil

Mix together in a bowl large enough to fit your chicken slices into.

Bread your Chicken

I think the technical term is called “dredging”, but I’m probably wrong on that, and I don’t have time to Google it.

Basically, take your chicken, dip it in your liquidy-stuff and let the excess drip off, then coat it in your biscuit crumb mixture.

If you have leftover liquid and breadcrumbs, do it again. This gives you extra thick breading.

Bake your chicken

For the size of strip that I had, I put them in the oven at 350 for 15 minutes, took them out, turned the oven up to 375, and put the chicken back in for another 10-15 minutes.

I hope you enjoy!