Chicken Cycle
Photo by Melissa Schneider.
One of the easiest of my “cycles,” the cascades of dinners I make from leftovers, is the one I do with chicken. Roast a chicken at the beginning of the week, or take a raw one apart, and you've got a few meals for two at the ready.
I started on Monday with a roast chicken, purchased at Berkeley’s farmers’ market. I rubbed it down on Sunday night with salt and dried oregano so that it would be flavorful when I cooked it. I pulled the chicken out of the oven and chopped off the rear legs to serve with steamed carrots, mashed potatoes that I had speckled with carrot greens, and a gravy made from chicken broth and beer, the leftover cooking liquid from a nettle soup I had made the night before. I wrapped the rest of the bird and left it in the refrigerator.
Tuesday I carved off one of the breasts, chopped it into pieces, reheated those in a sauté pan, and served them on top of a salad of mixed greens, persimmon slices, carrots, and dried figs. Wednesday I carved the other breast away from the skeleton and added it to pasta with braised kale. Friday — I teach on Thursday nights — I made chicken pot pie with the wing meat and other scraps still on the carcass, store-bought puff pastry (even I use it when I don’t have time to make my own), peas, carrots, corn, and bacon; I served the pie with broccoli and garnished Melissa’s pot pie with a little puff pastry heart that I cut from the leftover dough. Everyone together: Awwww. (If you find yourself with leftover puff pastry dough in general, keep the scraps in the freezer and use them to make palmiers at some later date.)
We’re getting used to eating less meat now that we’re “house poor.” We’re not going vegetarian, but the kind of meat we support tends to be more expensive: We can’t afford a $12 roast chicken every night.
But a thrifty cook can use meat as an accent to add texture and flavor to a dish without using a big blob of protein as a crutch for delivering good food. Add a bit of meat at a time, and you can stretch expensive ingredients longer. That $12 chicken cost us, on average, $3 a night. And I haven’t even made stock with it yet. Some meats work better than others for this — you don’t need much ham or bacon to flavor a dish — but I think a little thought can stretch just about anything.
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