Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Chicken Leg Quarters

I mentioned in Menu Plan Monday that I was going to have a lot of chicken meals this week due to a good deal I received on chicken leg quarters. I've heard from a few people who said that they don't purchase the leg quarters because they didn't think there was enough meat there to make it worth buying. I'm hoping this post will change your mind if you think that way!!

Today I cooked off the entire bag to make several meals. I removed 4 quarters from the bag and set them aside for dinner tonight. I took the remaining 6 and placed them in my crock pot with about a cup of water and cooked them on low all day. At dinner time, I turned off the pot and removed the chicken to a platter to cool.

For dinner, I baked the four quarters. Two were covered in barbeque sauce for DH and I and two were "oven fried" with bread crumbs for the kids. They were wonderful!!! I just coated the oven fried ones with a little egg and the bread crumbs and placed them on a cookie sheet, and poured some sauce over the other two. I baked all of them at 375° for about 25 minutes, until the temperature was 170°.

The picture isn't great, but here is my barbequed chicken:
And here is the oven fried variety - it's my son's piece, so please ignore the Spiderman plate! :)

After our yummy dinner, I returned to the now-cooled leg quarters in my kitchen. I easily removed the skin and then set about deboning and shredding the meat. It went very quickly, as the meat had cooked all day and was falling off the bone. I was able to shred it with my fingertips. After about 10 minutes of work, I had a wonderful pile of shredded chicken for my other recipes this week:


That is a full-sized dinner plate heaped with chicken ready for recipes!

The next step was to strain the tasty broth for tomorrow night's chicken noodle soup. A bowl, a strainer, and a piece of cheesecloth were all that I needed to produce this LOVELY chicken stock:
I will refrigerate it tonight and remove all the fat before turning it into soup for tomorrow. Real chicken stock is light years away from the bouillon variety - if you haven't tried it, you absolutely MUST!

Doesn't that look worth the $4.90 that I paid for all this chicken?? And it's going to make us five dinners! That's less than a dollar a meal for the meat to feed 5 people, with leftovers! And the same principles apply to the utilization of leftover chicken. If you make too much, you can simply shred what is left and make an entirely different dinner. I posted a couple of recipes in earlier blog postings if you need a little inspiration.

Thanks for reading, and please leave me a comment to let me know you were here! Have a wonderful week!!

8 comments:

  1. Good deal! You did well with all that chicken. I love to pre-cook chicken in my crock pot, then either freeze it or make other meals during the week from it.

    When my son was playing mucho amount of sports in High School and we were on the run 3 - 5 nights per week, I did that very thing.

    I morphed meals off the cooked chicken, pork chops, or whatever was on sale that week for those 'busy' nights.

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  2. I just discovered your blog and I love the ideas. Thanks!

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  3. I just re-posted a post I did last year about meat cuts and how to determine which cuts are the best buy at any given price. Maybe that will help those who were questioning whether leg quarters are a good deal or not.

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  4. Oooh, love your blog, love your ideas!!

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  5. I found your blog from WFMW and I have to say that the chicken legs in the crockpot is brilliant! To get the chicken stock like that plus to then shred the chicken was great! Can't wait to do that!

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  6. Janelle, I do the same thing with chicken leg quarters and recently bought four 5 lb bags and two 10 lb bags. A good deal of them will be cooked just as you state in your entry. Some will be put in the fridge to use later that week and some will be frozen for use down the road. Leg quarters are still one of the best meat deals out there!

    I just posted an entry on my blog about our dinner tonight made entirely of leftovers. I think even you would be proud. lol

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  7. Janelle, Thanks for the great ideas for making baby food on my blog.
    Your blog is great! I'm going to try the chicken hind quarters in the crock pot. It's can be really tricky deboning them, but this sounds super easy. Thanks!

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  8. Thank you for a wonderful posting! We are on a tight budget right now until next week, so hubby bought some chicken leg quarters he found on sale at BiLo for 59 cents a pound. I am going to do exactly what you did. I will reserve some for dinner tomorrow night, and the rest are going into the crock pot. I will shred the chicken and use it to make chicken salad for the kids lunches this coming week, and the stock will be frozen for future soup making when it gets cold in two months. Awesome ideas! Thanks so much!

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