'Free' Wing Night!

That's right.  Free wing night.  In our (or your!) very own home.

How is it possible to have free wing night?

I can't take credit for this trick; my wing-loving husband came up with it.

Buy a whole chicken. (Buying a whole chicken is quite economical, especially if you can squeeze two or three meals out of it plus make broth with the bones.)

Cut off the wings when you use the chicken, however you use it.  But, cut off the wings. Cut them into their two separate pieces and cut off the wing tip. Save the wing tip to throw in with the carcass when you make broth. Throw the wings into the bag in your freezer that is designated for wings.

Now comes the hard part: wait until you have accumulated enough wings to throw yourself a free wing night. When the day comes, it's a party!  Chris and I look forward to eating wings after the kids go to bed. (Not every night..., although some weeks we want to!) Chris loves wings, and I craved them when I was pregnant with John. Chris loved that.  :-)

Tonight, we party!

This is the best way to eat wings!  The chickens I buy are organic, but when you order wings from a restaurant, they are far from it.  Not only are we saving ourselves the exposure to the anti-biotic GMO chicken that is served at restaurants, but we also are saving ourselves some money.  Do we still order wings from restaurants sometimes? Yes, occasionally.  But we appreciate it so much more-- the wings are tastier, the homemade blue cheese dressing is killer... when we save them up in the freezer.

So if you like wings, and you like to eat organic, or even if you just want to save yourselves some money, try this trick!  It is awesome! :-)

ps. be aware that wings off a chicken you buy at the store are smaller than the ones you get from a restaurant, so plan to make more than you would normally eat.

Dinner on the fire!

Tonight's dinner is cooking on the fire! I love that it doesn't heat my house up and I get to be outside.  What's more, usually when we cook on the fire, Chris does it, and all I have to do is prep. :-)

What's for dinner tonight? Chicken legs, baked potatoes and baked sweet potatoes and a salad.

Other exciting news: we got some plants for our garden today!

One Pan Dinners

I have been trying to simplify my life.  (I kind of laugh as I write this, because I feel like there is no possible way to simplify my life enough, and also because as soon as I simplify one area, I usually end up complicating another area!)

One area of my life that has been complicated, time consuming and sometimes stressful is dinner. Chris takes leftovers to work for lunch most days, so I cook something different every night. I also like to have a store of leftovers to offer for lunch and possibly dinner on the weekends.  This store lightens my load a bit on the weekends and frees up some family time.  :-)

That being said, I have been trying to simplify my dinner routine, at least a few nights a week, by prepping something that is all in one pan or pot (or crock pot).  I can throw it all into the pan and walk away, letting it cook.

Tonight, I seared two chicken breasts, added two cups of rice, two cups of milk, two cups of water (I would have used chicken broth if I had any), five cut up carrots and a bag of frozen corn (we did eight dozen this year!). I salted it, peppered it, garlic powdered it, and walked away.  (Well, I turned on the stove first!)  The prep time to do all this (including cutting the chicken breasts off the whole chicken) took about fifteen minutes. Dinner will take about an hour to cook.  While I would normally spend about an hour and fifteen minutes in the kitchen, now I am only spending 15.  I can use the extra hour before dinner to clean up, finish up school for the day, play a game with my kids, fold laundry, empty the dishwasher, bathe the kids, type a blog post,... the possibilities are endless! (I don't think I could get ALL that done in one hour, but a few of those items will be attainable!)  :-P

Some other recipes I can think of that are one pan:
Vegetable Soup, or any soup really
Chili
Beans and Rice
Lasagna
Hog Maw Cabbage Rolls

Can you think of any good dishes like these? I am always looking for new ones!

Homemade Barbeque Sauce

The other day I wanted to make some grilled chicken, and add some pizzazz. I usually just grill the chicken... but I felt that would be boring this particular evening.  I thought of barbeque sauce because we were also having potato wedges and Chris and the kids love to dip their fries in barbeque sauce.

Again, I 'poked around on the internet' meaning, I googled "homemade barbeque sauce" and clicked on the first one.

I modified it, mostly because I didn't have enough ketchup to make the original recipe. (And also because it has WAY too much sugar for our family.) And I don't have red wine vinegar.

Here's what I came up with:

Homemade Barbeque Sauce
3/4 cup ketchup
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup honey
3 TBS- 1/4 cup molasses
Generous TBS Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp ground mustard
1 1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground pepper

Whisk all ingredients together. Put on whatever you want!  Yum.

We really liked this.  Chris said if I hadn't mentioned it, he would have assumed it came from the store.  :-) I will definitely be making this again.

Chicken-- what I do with it.

Last week sometime, I posted that I would write about what I do with a whole chicken when I buy a chicken. I will try to recap what I have done with the last few, so that you can maybe get some ideas. One thing I always do is make broth.  I have been making broth in my crock pot overnight with really great results.  I will go through that later too.

Chicken #1
Meal 1-- Roasted chicken, butternut squash, stuffing and gravy
Meal 2-- Salad with chicken, cous cous, hard boiled eggs and homemade Caesar dressing
Broth-- Three scant quarts canned

Chicken #2
Meal 1-- Roasted chicken, broccoli and french fries (potato wedges)
Meal 2-- Chicken tacos, rice pudding
Broth-- Four quarts canned

Chicken #3
Meal 1-- Chicken, quiona and chickpea pilaf
Meal 2-- Chicken and waffles, corn
Broth-- Four quarts canned

Chicken #4
Meal 1-- Chicken, mashed potatoes, cauliflower
Meal 2-- Chicken rice and corn soup
Broth-- Four quarts canned


Chicken #5
Meal 1-- Chicken, Carrots, asparagus, cranberry relish
Meal 2-- Beans and rice with chicken and spinach, green beans
Meal 3-- Chicken salad sandwiches, acorn squash
Broth-- Three or four quarts

So, I just went back through my food log calendar.  We have eaten six whole chickens this year so far (I only remember exactly what happened to five of them, so I didn't write down the sixth).

I would like to try and stretch more of my chickens to three meals and broth, but that requires me cooking the chicken and picking it and cooking something else that has chicken in it for dinner.  That is a lot of extra prep, that I have not had the time or energy to attempt recently.  I'm thinking we'll table that idea for the next five or six months at this point.  :-)

About my broth-- I have been using the crock pot to make my broth overnight, which is great, because I don't have to constantly check on it, and the stove doesn't have to be on, and I don't have to even be home if I don't want to be.  (Ask Chris about how I put on a pot of beans and took a nap and he came home to smoking beans on the stove because the water all cooked off.... oops.)

1. First I pick all the meat off the bones and put it in a bag or something to make into another meal.  
2. Then, I put the bones, a carrot or two, an onion (or half, if I'm feeling stingy), and a stalk of celery into the crock pot with about a tablespoon of salt.  I fill up the crockpot with water.  I add a tablespoon or two of apple cider vinegar to the water and leave it sit until I am ready to go to bed.  Adding the vinegar helps pull out the gelatin from the bones-- the part of broth that is really good for you.  I was skeptical of this step when I first started doing it recently (I read about it in Nourishing Traditions), but I kept doing it because the bones were actually kind of floppy when I fished them out the next day.  
3. Turn the crock pot on low at bedtime.  
4. In the morning, or whenever I get to it the next day, I strain it through a mesh strainer.  
5. Can or freeze the broth.  I usually can mine in quart jars, which I try to do as soon as I can after straining it, so it doesn't get cold.  But, you can also freeze it.  In that case, you will want to let it cool before putting it in containers and putting it in the freezer. 
6. Use broth to make delicious soups or when you are making rice for dinner. I have been using mine at lunch a lot to make quick soups that the kids really like.  Corn/peas/carrots/alphabet noodles is a favorite lunch time soup right now.  :-)

Well, I feel like this was a long and wordy post.  I hope you got something out of it, even if it was just a meal idea or a laugh at my stupidity with beans.  :-)

Happy cooking!