AIBU to start to believe in the magical Mumsnet chicken?

[HootOwl]

Maybe it is actually real?! 🐔😆

I roasted an (admittedly huge) chicken and also this was all only to feed me and two small children so not huge portions but from one chicken we had:

Roast dinner
Chicken fricassee
Chicken risotto
Chicken pasta bake
Paprika chicken
Chicken soup
Crispy chicken skin (snack)

Will make the effort to roast a whole one more often! I swear it only had two breasts, two legs and two wings...

@Thethreecs you are all having 600g of chicken as a portion?! That is 6x the recommended amount. Or you are just eating the breast and throwing away most of the meat?

We are a family of 5, 2 littles so I guess 3.5 portion per meal. A large chicken does us a roast, then a pie and then stir fry. Three meals. That’s about 10.5 portions. If a 2kg chicken is 1.4kg of meat then each portion is about 130grams per portion so hardly measly, just not glutinous.

@HootOwl Ahhhh but you mentioned the MN chicken fallacy! That never goes well 😂

@gluenotsoup

Where are you buying these chickens?? The last time I bought a supposedly large chicken, from Tesco, it was absolutely tiny. We managed a roast dinner for 5 plus soup with the leftover meat, totally stripped down and stock made with the carcass. That’s it! I need a giant chicken.

Mine was just from Sainsbury's.

[quote daisyjgrey]@HootOwl Ahhhh but you mentioned the MN chicken fallacy! That never goes well 😂[/quote]
We live and learn! It's been a very useful thread for me though with some great ideas

I roasted a 2kg chicken yesterday, then got pinged by track & trace so my guests couldn’t come. It’s just DH and I (and dog), and we ate most of one breast and part of one leg. We’ll have the same tonight, and I’ll turn it over and strip off the rest for at least two more meals and make stock for soup or risotto. If I had two more adults to feed I’d have expected to finish all the breast and probably the legs, but would still have the underneath to make another meal from, and the stock.

@Indecisivelurcher

We're the same. I'm getting a bit fed up of eating leftovers all week though?! Fave meal with leftover chicken is chicken and black beans wraps, or chicken, black bean and kale soup, both bbc good food recipes.

Freezer! I freeze it in portions for a meal for us three then use it over a couple of weeks so we don't have chicken every day. Roast chicken (and the skin!) freezes really well.

@daisyjgrey

A 2kg chicken has about 1.4kg of meat on it. A health portions is around 100g

I refuse to live in a world where a 'portion' is less than one average sized chicken breast. Absolutely not.

The thing is, you do live in that world. So do the rest of us, and I imagine I speak for most of us when I say that I hope my children and their descendants still have an inhabitable world in future.

100g of meat, as pointed out several times, is a perfectly adequate portion for the vast majority of people, backed up by actual peer-reviewed evidence. The IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on Climate Change and Land stated in August 2019 that we'll have to eat much less than that - effectively a plant based diet with (very) occasional meat if I recall correctly - to get anywhere near true sustainability.

When I think of what is 'obscene' I have historically thought of things like extreme porn - things that most people normal regard as unacceptable and indefensible. But I'm beginning to change my mind. Six kilograms of chicken for seven people is just as obscene, made all the worse by people trying to defend it and normalise it. No wonder we're fucked.

But then you have to separate the mush of bones, veg etc and it splashes everywhere to end up with a load of tasteless dishwater that you then have to store because you've no immediate use for chicken stock, because you've just had chicken and want to eat something else.

You drain it over the sink, through a sieve! And if it is tasteless you made it wrong, honest. There are some appallingly bad 'recipes' for stock out there, on some of the most used sites. And you can reduce it and reduce it until it can be frozen back as large ice cubes.

I just use nice stock cubes, eg Kallo. Nicer, cheaper, less messy.

And way to salty, weird tasting for me. But not cheaper. Easier yes, but not cheaper!

I think we have peaked. Someone has just conflated extreme porn with eating chicken.

Stick a fork in (precisely 100g of) me, I'm done!

And way to salty, weird tasting for me. But not cheaper. Easier yes, but not cheaper

All the recipes for stock include the addition of salt. Plus onions, carrots and celery. A stock cube costs about 20 pence. Surely once you've added an onion, couple of carrots, some celery and bubbled the thing away all day in the slow cooker, it's not costing less than 20 p?

@BarbaraofSeville

And way to salty, weird tasting for me. But not cheaper. Easier yes, but not cheaper

All the recipes for stock include the addition of salt. Plus onions, carrots and celery. A stock cube costs about 20 pence. Surely once you've added an onion, couple of carrots, some celery and bubbled the thing away all day in the slow cooker, it's not costing less than 20 p?

We use old veg and the tops and tails that don't get eaten otherwise. I have a bag in the freezer for them. Very little salt gets added. I don't know whether it's my taste buds but the low salt Kallax etc taste very salty to me.

And a slow cooker uses very, very little energy. According to various newspapers who asked USwitch at the time the new energy prices were being introduced, October ish last year, I think, the average slow cooker uses about 1.3kWh over eight hours of cooking time.

Uswitch said that would cost 14.37p per kWh. So about 18p of fuel for the equivalent of about 20 stock cubes, plus the odds and ends of veg etc.

Freezer use? Well, it takes up very little space and my freezer is always full anyway!

@BarbaraofSeville a stock cube only makes a pint though, whereas for homemade stock you can make a lot more from one carcass. Stock is a really good use for onion skins!

I put maybe a pinch of salt in my stock.

A chicken stock cube, that is one chicken stock cube, contains between 800mg/1.2g of salt.

It would here. Altho I'd love it to last more than one meal.
I get the largest one in tesco. Does 1 roast. 3 adult portions. 2 kids 1 toddler. Were huge meat eaters.
If there is ever may left I meat just make it for sandwiches the next day. But not often

Even the low salt ones contain around 0.5mg of salt.

And the cheaper they are, the more salt they contain. Aldi stock cubes for instance which are only 80p for 8, contain 4.2g of salt, that’s 2 3rds of your recommended salt intake a day.

I scrutinise salt content on packets because I have a heart condition and a fluid restriction and have to keep my salt down as far as possible.

Chicken stock is actually more expensive to make, although technically if you’re making it from an existing carcas it isn’t really. But 20p stock cubes are generally salt and seasoning and very little else.

I grant you vegetable stock is tasteless, but chicken stock really isn’t.

If you have any stuffing left as well, put that and some chicken in a jar of pasta sauce (cheap tomato one is fine). Heat up, eat, bloody lovely and quick!

Freezer use? Well, it takes up very little space and my freezer is always full anyway!

Also freezers are actually more energy efficient when full so you save money there also!

@daisyjgrey

I think we have peaked. Someone has just conflated extreme porn with eating chicken.

Stick a fork in (precisely 100g of) me, I'm done!

Lol!!!!

Not a turn I foresaw the thread taking.

@Thethreecs genuine question - what would happen if you took your family to say a Toby Carvery? Because the meat is 'rationed', everyone gets the same and you can eat as much of everything else as you like. Nobody leaves a carvery hungry.

And don't say, 'we wouldn't go because there wouldn't be enough meat' purely hypothetical, what would they do?

I didn't say your facts were wrong, I said that there are limits to this madness and sharing an average sized chicken breast between two adults is absurd. I would be laughed out of my own kitchen at the very notion

We do one standard chicken breast between two as I like adding as much veg as is physically possible to meals - but the ones on a whole chicken are even bigger.

I'm certainly not a teeny tiny little eater, either.

We either slow cook a whole chicken and then do lots of meals with the leftover meat (usually one breast, the legs/thighs, oysters, sides are left, which does 4 - 5 meals for two plus a couple of lunches like GF pasta salad) + the obligatory soups with wings, carcass and scraps - or I leave DP looking rather alarmed as I get out the Big Knife and portion it up for the freezer as soon as it's in the house.

The velociraptor chicken we got one Christmas Eve was a whole other ballgame, though. I think the butcher just wanted it gone, as it was absolutely massive and only cost a fiver.

[quote TibetanTerrah]@Thethreecs genuine question - what would happen if you took your family to say a Toby Carvery? Because the meat is 'rationed', everyone gets the same and you can eat as much of everything else as you like. Nobody leaves a carvery hungry.

And don't say, 'we wouldn't go because there wouldn't be enough meat' purely hypothetical, what would they do?[/quote]
Or pretty much any restaurant... they don't generally serve half a cow or a whole chicken per person. 🤣🤦🏻‍♀️

@daisyjgrey

Oh gif only on MN could people argue about whether it's "greedy" to want to eat a whole chicken breast...🤦🏼‍♀️

This chicken in question weighed 2kg. The breast of it weighed around 200g when cooked. If I had tried to eat that whole thing myself, even with no vegetables etc, I would not have been able to. That is a crazy amount of meat for one meal, I was stuffed with half the breast and roast potatoes, veg etc. I am not small: I am slim but I'm 5'11" and I love food and certainly don't "eat like a sparrow" as was suggested by a PP. 🙄

I find some of the responses here very odd. I did caveat my original post saying that this was for one adult and two small kids so effectively only two adult portions per meal. So clearly in a household that has 4 adults you'd get half as many meals, roughly, from one chicken the same size. But the idea in some posts that ONE adult portion should be 700g of meat makes me feel a bit sick. I'm not sure how anybody could eat that.

@ HootOwl maybe they’re all on the Atkins diet, so they don’t have anything with it, just a slab or two of meat.

I could make a chicken last last four dinners pretty easily. I choose not to, because I like chicken, eat a Keri diet, and I’d rather eat half of one in one meal. But it’s great that all the people who couldn’t possibly manage more than 130g of chicken for dinner are effectively balancing out my consumption. It’s this level of cooperation which makes the world go round.

Pork shoulder.