WorryFreeMom

So the experiment continues this week!  I love shopping at the Farmer’s market here in New Braunfels, and about every other week, I buy a whole chicken from a local farmer.  I have found that the chicken can last our family of five about three meals.  The first night, I bake the chicken and we have that for dinner.  The second night, I pull off the remaining meat and make something with that.  And then I’ll boil the carcass and make soup or chicken pot pie.  What was happening, though, is that I just didn’t ever get to that third step.  So, my amazing friend Jessica told me to try doing it the other way–start with the soup!

So, that’s what I did on Tuesday.  I cooked my chicken all day in the crockpot with some broth and veggies (whatever I had–zucchini, carrots, potatoes).  By dinner time, the meat was just falling off the bone.  So, I pulled out the chicken and put it in a pan.  I pulled off about a cup of meat and put back into the crockpot and made some dumplings to go in, too.  While those were cooking, I pulled off the rest of the meatl–about 5 cups!  That was enough to make two batches of chicken enchiladas, leaving about 2 cups.  I put some in the fridge to make chicken salad sandwiches the next day, and the rest in the freezer for another quick dinner another night.

So, from one chicken, I essentially got 5 meals, plus about 3 cups of broth that I’m going to freeze in ice cube trays for later use.  Yahoo!

Karen