Further to my 'how many meals from a chicken' thread...

[hopefully]

I have completed phase one of mission chicken - roast for me and DP. I now have a chicken carcass, still with about half a chicken's worth of meat on it.

So my plan is to:
a) strip the chicken of all its meat
b) make stock using the carcass, a couple of onions, garlic, carrots etc
c) turn stock into soup tomorrow by adding some of the leftover meat and barley soup mix and some more veggies
d) keep rest of meat to use in risotto or similar. Also, would I be able to freeze this meat, so we can use it on the weekend rather than having chicken 4 days on the trot?

PS, my roast was bloody amazing, first time I have ever made roast without help, thanks to everyone who encouraged me to begin mission chicken!

It is tasty!

do you think noodles would be nice in it?? I like soups with 'stuff' in um if you know what i mean

trick with stock is not adding too much water and cooking very gently - you don't need to boil away for hours. About 1 1/2 to 2 hours should do it. I start off by adding just the water (about 2 inches more than the bones/carcass, that's all. Bring to boil slowly, then you can skim off the foamy stuff as it rises. Once you've done that, add carrot, celery, garlic, whole peppercorns, bay leaves etc and barely simmer. This way you should get a lovely rich jellyish stock - if you add to much water you will get no flavour and no amount of reducing will bring it back!

I find the egg and the corn give the soup enough 'stuff' in it, but you could add some rice noodles if you like, it would still be good!

Thanks for the stock/soup tips - I'll be revisiting this thread next time I do chicken!

Enjoyed my night off chicken, and going to DP's mum's for dinner tomorrow, so filo parcel extravaganza will occur on friday. Am quite looking forward to it!

For anyone who's interested, I made chicken stir fry with the leftover chicken (and a rather sad looking carrot, a courgette, some beansprouts and loads of soy sauce) and cooked it in filo shells (lined a muffin tin with filo pastry). It was bloody yummy! Also made some noodles to go on the side.

So out of my entire chicken I got:

1. 2 big servings of roast dinner (with yorkshire puddings, carrots, spinach, courgette, onion gravy etc)
2. 1 big chicken sandwich for DP
3. 6 servings of chicken soup, bulked out with barley (4 eaten, 2 in the freezer for post baby emergency meal!)
4. 2 servings chicken stir fry filo parcels.

So in total, my chicken (organic, free range, cost £10) formed the basis of 5 meals, 11 servings of food, which is pretty impressive I reckon. Given that the rest of the ingredients I used came to only a few quid extra, it's certainly no more expensive than anything else I cook, and probably a lot cheaper than most!

Am definitely going to do it again next month, doing the following things differently:

1. cook the stock for longer, and strain it afterwards, putting in new soup ingredients
2. use some of the stock for risotto or similar, rather than making quite so much soup.
3. calculate the cost of all the ingredients so i can see more clearly how money-efficient I'm being!

hopefully, just out of curiosity, did you use ready to use filo out of a packet? and how did you seal them? i'm debating a chicken on my list but it gets a bit boring sometimes so these may liven it up a bit!!

Yes, I used filo from a packet - half a pack did about 6 muffin cases full.

I left some open, and just folded the filo other on some others - I brushed melted butter over the top couple of sheets, which sealed it shut (popped open a bit during cooking, but didn't affect anything!)

When my mother does them, she makes triangular parcels and seals them with a beaten egg brushed over the joins, i believe.

I've also had similar success in previous years with puff pastry from a pack, making little squares, brushing with egg, scoring a square in the middle with a knife (not all the way through) and plonking leftovers or whatever in the middle - idea is that pastry puffs around the edges, staying flat where the scored square with food is, creating a kind of square bowl with food in the middle.

cheers hopefully, i'll add packet pastry to my list and give it a whirl