Thrifty!

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thewrongtim  and I spent most of yesterday in a cooking frenzy.  In an effort to save some cash, we've decided to take a Dream Dinners-esque approach to our meals- we're buying ingredients in bulk, spreading throughout different meals and then freezing them so they're easy to defrost and eat when we get home from work.

On Friday night, tim put two chickens

Comments

[aurienne]

I also echo the requests for all the soup recipes! I have been so bad about doing soups this year. I have a great chicken stock recipe though: from Cook's Illustrated (but cheap!) - March April 2000, but I've seen it in other issues too. The secret is the sweating.

1 TBS vegetable oil (I normally use olive)
1 medium onion, chopped medium (leave the skin on for some darker coloration for the broth)
4 lbs chicken backs/necks, hacked into 2" pieces. (Chicken backs are really cheap. Or if you're doing a whole chicken, save the backs for this).
2 quarts BOILING water
2 tsp salt
2 Bay Leaves

1) heat oil till shimmering. Saute onions until slightly softened. Move onions to a bowl on the side.
2) take half the chicken pieces. Saute until no longer pink - 4-5 minutes. (yay carmelization!). Transfer to onion bowl, saute the rest of the chicken.
3) All the onion and chicken back into the pot. Reduce heat to low, cover, cook about 20 minutes (chicken releasing its juices - aka "sweating").
4) Increase heat to high. Add water (already boiling), salt, bay leaves. Simmer at a med-low for about 20 minutes.
5) Strain broth, discard solids. Defat. Done!

This is the best, cheapest, fastest chicken-stock recipe.

For a really STRONG veggie-stock (we even use it to replace beef broth at times), I like http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Worlds-Greatest-Vegetable-Broth/Detail.aspx -- I eliminate turnips frequently (because I forget about them), and green peppers (expensive, not adding my favorite flavor to this), and use whatever cheap onions we got at Costco. But the mega-roasting is amazing.

Ironkite likes to reduce that one so it's triple-concentrated, and then freeze it in 1/2 cup sized portions (dixie cups, basically), so it's easy to re-add to anything.