...eat? Stretching a chicken

And by "stretching a chicken" I mean how can we make a whole chicken (a 5 lb bird) last for several meals.  And by "several" I mean four dinners (for 3 people each), a pot full of broth, a lunch (for all three of us again) and several freezer portions of food. 

To be fair, I will admit that we don't eat as much meat as is typical on the Standard American Diet (SAD).  We're nowhere near vegan proportions, but meat is not the focal point of our plate nor do we eat animal protein at every meal.  We do however eat A LOT of food!  I'm feeding a 6'3" Marine and a very active, very tall 5 year old...oh and I eat a lot too!

So how did I do it? It all began when a friend of mine (check out her blog here) told me I could buy locally pastured organic-fed chicken from Living Earth Ranch.  We've been trying to eat more locally grown, in season food so we were ecstatic, to say the least.  I ordered my chicken and planned my meals.  At the end of this post I've told you how I did it and what we ate this week.

I only bring this up because I recently realized that we spend way to much on groceries. Don't misunderstand, quality food is important, but our grocery bill had skyrocketed to around $800/month.  I'm quite diligent about making a meal plan, I like having a specific grocery list when I shop, and we don't throw food away.  I make sure it's eaten or frozen before it spoils.  So how was it costing us so much just to eat? Is eating organically and locally grown food that costly?  Can it be done for less?  I recently read quite a few posts on Lisa Leake's blog 100 Days of Real Food where she and her family had "100 days on a budget".  Their budget was a shockingly low $125/week.  Now I'll grant you, some of what they ate wasn't very spectacular sounding, but they managed to do it. Since a big chunk of their budget was spent on high quality milk, and we don't use much milk, I knew we could do better.  So I tried, and this is what happened.  I bought all of our produce for the week (and we eat a lot of produce), all of our pantry items, 6 organic/pastured eggs and that 5 lb ($20) chicken.  It cost me $85 for all of it.  I will admit that I had a couple of the ingredients in the pantry already so adding all of those back into the bill, we spent around $100 this week.  Extraordinary!  Goodbye expensive grocery trips, hello savings!

Here's how we used this beautiful chicken this week:

• Sunday: (dinner #1) Roasted Chicken with roasted carrots, salad and homemade whole wheat biscuits
• Monday: chicken broth (using all of the bones from the whole chicken); with the broth and all the meat that fell off the bones, plus a little extra, I made (dinner #2) Chicken Tortilla Soup with all the toppings -- see photo
• Tuesday: (lunch) Chicken Tortilla Soup and salad; (dinner #3) BBQ Chicken Sandwiches served with oven fries, baked beans and coleslaw
• Thursday: (dinner #4) Chicken, Spinach and Mushroom Quesadillas served with salsa and guacamole, Spanish Rice and Refried Beans -- see photo 
• The leftover soup was placed in freezer bags for lunches or dinners on another day! -- see photo

While I didn't list what we ate for the other meals, my family assures me it was all delicious.  My son's "yummy" noises should be ample proof!


How have you stretched a chicken (or a cow, pig, lamb...)?  Send me pictures and recipes for how you and your family have done the same or better!

I took a couple pictures of what we ate this week: