Shannon from Adventures of a Crazy Life shares how she stretched one package of chicken to last for four dinners. Some great ideas and suggestions!
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Great idea Shannon. You are such an awesome frugal mom!
Cheryl 🙂
We do this quite often. I always use chicken mixed into a meal rather than as a main dish. I have three boys who are still young, so I’m pretty sure I will need more than one package of chicken one these days, though!
The only problem is that my husband would eat all of that chicken + more. How many people is that little bit of chicken supposed to feed?
Two adults and two children. When you mix it in with vegetables, grains, and sauces you don’t notice that you aren’t getting as much chicken as you are accustomed to.
Remember that a serving of meat is 3-4oz or roughly half of a chicken breast! It’s easy to forget that – we all tend to way overeat when it comes to meat.
Hope that’s helpful!
Lea
I love this. The chicken is not necessarily meant to be the main event at dinner, but mixed in with other ingredients to make it stretch farther. So instead of eating a whole chicken breast, you are still getting the chicken (just a little less), but also the rest of the dish and sides. Works for me! Great post, Shannon! 🙂
I love to buy chicken in bulk when it is on sale, cook a lot and really spread it out through quite a few meals! It is a lot easier to use it right away and freeze it either ready to cook or already cooked. Thawing out a bulk chicken that is not divided is no fun at all!
Not sure this would work with large families and those with adolescent or youth aged children. We go through 3lbs of meat in one meal with youth aged children.
You can definitely make it work — you just might need two or three packages of chicken, instead of one! 🙂
I get that! I have 3 teenage boys, a daughter and a husband. It is a treat if I have the chicken as the center piece of a meal. Think pasta or rice to make it spread!
Very impressive! I started slicing my chicken breasts in half when I realized the portion size was out of control. It’s like an instant way to save half on chicken!
We used to do this but have switched to buying a rotisserie chicken from Sam’s Club ($4.88 for a whole chicken, and better-tasting than any others we’ve tried). We eat that for dinner the first day, along with several sides so we don’t eat tons of it, and then pick the whole thing clean and save the shredded chicken for other meals. We make chicken & cheese quesadillas, enchiladas, and a chicken casserole, or add some chicken in to a chopped salad or a creamy pasta dish. We probably get at least 4 meals out of a rotisserie chicken, because we try to treat it as an add-on, not a main dish.