Dinner Tonight - December 16th - Roasted Chicken

Tonight I am roasting a chicken with cut up potatoes, carrots and an onion.  I like to mix some dried herbs such as savory, marjoram and thyme along with some butter and rub it on the chicken and then I salt it a little before putting it in the oven to roast.  As to the vegetables I will chunk them, sprinkle some of the herbs on them and drizzle with a little oil and put them along side the chicken to roast.  I'll take some of the fruit that I have on hand and make a fruit salad supplementing it with some canned fruit.  I also have dinner rolls in the freezer and a brownie mix that I need to use up for dessert.  If I didn't have dinner rolls in the freezer, I would make some cornbread.

This is a 5 lb chicken so I'll get a few meals out of it, unless there is some late night snacking, which is okay.  This chicken was on sale a couple of months ago for only 68 cents a lb.  I watch as people usually walk by whole chickens when they are on sale and they opt for the boneless skinless chicken breasts.  I used to do that, but not anymore.  I find that I can get quite a bit of meat from a whole chicken that far outweighs the cost of bone to meat ratio.  Also, I bought a pair of good quality kitchen shears and I taught myself how to cut up a chicken. 

As an example, when chicken hindquarters go on sale for only 38 cents a lb., I buy 20 lbs.  When I get home I take my kitchen shears and cut apart the drumsticks from the thighs.  Just doing that increases the savings of the meat.  Drumsticks and thighs go on sale for 98 cents a lb. and with only a few minutes of work I have taken those hindquarters and transformed them into more expensive chicken pieces.

You can take a whole chicken and put it in a crockpot and cook it on low for several hours and the meat will fall off the bone. Take that meat and you can use it anywhere from casseroles and soup to chicken salad sandwiches. 

So, don't pass that whole chicken by when it goes on sale, as it is a really great value.