Frugal February #7: What Do I Do With a Chicken?

I was actually asked that once: "What do I do with a chicken?"  The mom of one of DS2's friends was the one doing the asking.  Her son had recently volunteered to help us with butchering that year's flock of meat birds, and in gratitude for his assistance, at the end of 3 hours of butchering I had sent him home with a genuine local pasture raised chicken.  Three and half pounds, whole.

His mother is a friend of mine, but one of those friends that isn't your bestie, is not your closest friend who is so like you that you know each other's thoughts.  She's one of my many mom friends--our kids are friends, and so we too are friends.  She knew what to do with chicken legs, or chicken breasts from the store, but apparently, even though she is about five years older than I am, she had never cooked a chicken before that didn't come pre-cut into serving size pieces.  She really wanted to use that awesomely delicious and nutritious chicken her son had worked for, but didn't have a clue how to.

  

You may not know this, but whole chicken is the cheapest way to buy it at the store.  Cutting it up adds cost.  Last week, when I was at the store, I peeked at chicken prices to see what I'm missing by raising my own:  a whole chicken, uncut was 89 cents a pound (store brand, name brand was more).  A whole chicken, cut as I'm about to show you, was $1.19 a pound (again, store brand).  So, for a 3 pound chicken, you are paying almost a dollar more to have it cut.

Maybe paying an extra dollar for that doesn't bother you.  But let's put it into perspective:

• Cutting a chicken is not hard. 
• Cutting a chicken is something anyone can learn.
• Cutting a chicken is not time consuming. Once you do it a few times, you can whip it out in about 5 minutes. 
• There are 12 5-minute increments in one hour. 

 So, if you're paying somebody else $1 (for sake of easy math) to save you 5 minutes of cutting a chicken, that works out to an hourly rate of $12.  Sound a little more outrageous now?  I know alot of teens (and older people too) who would love to make $12 an hour doing simple tasks.

So, if you don't all ready know how to cut your whole chicken into useable pieces, let me teach you.

Take your whole chicken.  If it's from the store, rinse it well, inside and out.  If it's not from the store, and you freshly butchered it yourself, you should do this too.  If it's from your freezer, and you raised and butchered it yourself, hopefully you rinsed it before packaging and freezing.

1.  Put your chicken on a cutting board. 

 2.  With a sharp knife, make a slit in the skin where the thigh and rib area of the chicken meet.   

3. Grabbing the drumsticks (legs), one in each hand, firmly press down, pushing the legs backward.  



 Turn the chicken upside down if necessary.  You should hear the hip joints pop.  Once that happens, you can easily cut the thighs away from the body .

4.If you want to separate the drumsticks from the thighs, you can now make a slit in the skin where they meet, and push them away from each other.  You should hear the joint separate, just like the hip joint did.  Cut them apart now. 

5.  Use the same technique to remove the wings from the body.

6.  I prefer boneless skinless breasts, so that is what I will demonstrate.  You can also have bone-in breasts, just cut the breastbone (keel) down the middle, and don't separate the meat from the ribs.  For boneless breasts, find where the meat attaches to the keel, and carefully cut the meat away from the bone.  Gently pull the breast toward you as you slide the knife between the ribcage and the meat.  Cut away at the bottom, and you have a boneless breast! 

For the back, you can cut through the spinal column, or just leave it attached to the carcass and use the whole thing for soup.  I prefer to do it that way, using the meat on the back in the soup.

carcass: keel bone, ribs, with back still attached

Ta Da!  You now have a chicken, in pieces, just like you can pay more for to buy pre-cut at the store.  It is now ready for any recipe you want to use it in. (I'd like to say, looking at these pictures of such a scrawny chicken, that this one was the runt of the bunch, only a 2.5 pounder.  Usually the pieces would be a bit bigger, and the whole thing more rounded.  Not all homegrown chickens look this puny.)

Here's one of our favorite recipes for a cut-up chicken:

Oven Fried Chicken
1 3 to 3.5 pound chicken, cut into pieces
1/4 cup shortening
1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp rosemary

Heat oven to 425 degrees.  While oven is heating, melt shortening and butter in a 13" x 9" x 2" baking dish.

Mix flour, salt, paprika, pepper and rosemary.  Pour into a gallon sized ziploc baggie (or you can use a brown paper lunch sack).  Place chicken pieces into bag, seal, and shake to coat chicken thoroughly with seasonings.

Place chicken skin-side down in melted butter/shortening mixture in baking dish.  Do not cover.  Put in oven on middle rack, and cook for 30 minutes.  Turn chicken over, and cook 25- 30 more minutes.

We like to serve this with mashed potatoes and corn or butternut squash.