inconvenience foods: the value of a chicken

How productive have I been today?

• I went grocery shopping and kept the total under $30
• At said grocery trip one of my-all time favorite beers was on sale! (so i bought it)
• I cleaned the kitchen AND took out the trash
• I made home-made chips from our copious amounts of corn tortillas
• I made chipotle hummus to free a canning jar for..
• I made 2 types of pickled onions (plain-ol’e-herb and fiery chipotle)
• I cleaned the kitchen.. again

And now I’m sitting down to finish a post I started (in my mind) nearly a month ago. Take THAT Christmas break laziness!

here’s my beer: yum.

Ever wander into your local UPS store and ask someone to help you ship a CD you made for your long-distance love interest? Only to find that the 10 seconds it took the employee to wrap and stamp your CD turned into a $10 processing fee. How about those simple online orders.. we’re already buying the item from them! Why are we forced to pay someone to put it in a box and pay AGAIN to ship it!? (I know why.. I’m just being dramatic)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how those small processing, labor and convenience fees are built into so many parts of our life and how much we could save if we didn’t have to pay them. Based on my own experience, the reason we choose to pay instead of handle things ourselves is because we don’t have time… well, since I don’t have a job, time is one thing I have plenty of. Yes – the ‘nonjob’ is dwindling the cash in the bank, so the question became, “How can I use my time to better mitigate this unstoppable loss of funds?”

Naturally.. chickens seemed like the perfect place to start.
I use stock a lot while cooking dinner, making general foods and while practicing sauces. We also eat a lot of chicken at home, so paying extra to buy it already butchered seemed like an ideal area to cut back.

The challenge: Pay less to buy whole chickens and utilize them than the cost of buying everything i am able to get out of those not-so-hairy hens.

I started with 2 whole chickens – each weighing between 3 and 5 pounds.

The cost: $9 for the chickens and about $3 for other misc. items (mirepoix and herbs). totaling $12.

After a lot of slimy slicing, a splatter of marrow or two, and a house that smelled like chicken for 2 days straight..

The harvest: 4 breasts, 4 tenderloins, 4 leg/thigh pieces and a full gallon of stock!

After scouring my local Fred Meyer looking for the hottest deals on my above reaping the results were delightful.

Convenience costs: 4 breasts – $6; 4 tenderloins – $3; 4 leg/thigh pieces – $6; 1 gallon (near equal quality) chicken stock – $12; all this totaling $27!!

Can you believe it!? Not only was I stunned at how cheaply I was able to get the same products, but I was excited about how much I could save by taking time to do it all myself. I get tremendous satisfaction going through this process.. maybe that’s why I’m in school to be a chef. Now, I understand that many of you don’t, in fact, have time to separate the meat from two full chickens, or have the time to make a gallon of chicken stock – and that’s fine. But, I challenge you to find areas in your life to quit paying convenience fees. Join the slow food movement and look for inconvenience foods that you can fit into your life.