The $8 Chicken Challenge

So recently I have been reading a lot of blogs as I am currently doing a lot of feeding the baby...aka sitting around for long periods of time for most of the day;-). Although this time is precious and a nice respite from the previously crazy pre-baby 9+ months preggo and need to get stuff done time I will admit I get a little bored hence, the blogs.

One thing I have been exploring is the concept of real food eating. Basically, eating foods made from scratch from whole food ingredients. Cutting out the processed foods that most of us have come to rely on as food staples. A true "real foodie" makes her own bread, cultured dairy products, tortillas, chicken stock, soups, and all her veggies come from the produce section not cans. The produce is organic and the meat, dairy and eggs are grass fed. Although I have not progressed to making my own sourdough tortillas...or my own sourdough anything as of yet, I do think that this way of eating is much healthier and worth

taking a good look at.

One conversation that seems to come up very often is "can real food be affordable?" We all know that canned foods, frozen foods, and conventionally raised meats and dairy are cheaper than their organic and grass-fed alternatives. However, if you are making a lot of these foods from scratch can you stretch a buck?

All this to say that I challenged myself to see how many meals/products I could make out of an $8 free range, no hormone, but not organic chicken. Sid

e note: The organic chicken was $14 bucks and I felt the

free-range chicken was very good as well.

So here is my chicken ready to be roasted. I put carrots, onions, and mushrooms below it as a side but also to use as roasted veggies though out the week. So 3 hours at 300 degrees and I had a perfectly roasted juicy chicken for dinner.

The next day I took off the rest of the meat, put it in a container in the fridge and made stock in my crockpot with the chicken carcass and some onion skins, carrot skins, celery tops, bay leaves, peppercorns, and garlic cloves. 12 hours later I had 3 quarts of beautiful healthy and tasty chicken stock.

The rest of the breakdown included:

Dinners:

Chicken tacos

Chicken with Salsa rice

Lunch:

Chicken and olive salad in lettuce wraps

Chicken sandwich

So in the end I had 3 dinners, 2 lunches, and 3 quarts of stock for future soups. Not bad for $8!

I think that this real foods things might not only be affordable but frugal. I could have even bought the organic chicken and still felt like I got my moneys worth!