One Chicken Many ways
Following the spate of publicity earlier this year for free range poultry, I've been doing some digging. Personally, I've been eating Free range for about a year now; someone recommended to me that I try Rose Price's book The Savvy Shopper and the result of reading that was a huge change in the way I approached food, and shopped. Anyway, Jamie, Hugh et al gave the cause a huge push this year with Channel 4's The Big Food Fight. One of the arguments oft chucked at us foodies is that it's 'too expensive' to eat ethically. Well a friend recently did an experiment - yes folks, it's time to don those safety goggles and hope that the hot boy from 4C that you fancy isn't in your Chemistry class. Just me? OK then, moving swiftly along - about how many meals you could get from a chicken, and therefore the cost per meal. Being at best unoriginal, and at worst a blatant copycat, I decided to recreate this myself this week. So we have The great Chicken challenge (note to self, must think of more interesting titles for challenges). I bought the chicken from Sainsburys on Saturday (don't get me started on the severe lack of halfway decent butchers in London), it cost £7.98 (it weighed about 2 and a bit kilos). The plan at present is to roast it, have sandwhiches, make a thai green curry, soup and stock... well see how this goes as the week progresses.
So far we have:
Sunday and Monday 3 portions of roast dinner
Monday lunch 1 chicken sandwhich
Tuesday dinner: Thai green curry (easily two portions - could be more but I'm starving)
Wednesday dinner: Leftover thai green curry
4 portions of chicken and vegetable soup
3 pints (split into 2 bags of 1 1/2 pints each) chicken stock for risotto/ more soup etc...
Current costing... £0.66 per meal... and that's not counting the fact that each of those portions of stock will make another 4 bowls of soup/ 3 - 4 portions of risotto...
I think we can safely say that free-range chicken isn't too expensive to buy. Remember folks I'm on a strict budget, and I haven't gone out and bought anything special to make these meals, it's all been with storecupboard ingredients. If I was really trying to stretch it out I could have added some barley to the soup and it would have probably done 6 - 8 portions.
I'll add some pictures later of each dish once I've had my second large portion of thai green curry.
1 comment:
The best butcher in London is Allens - it's as old fashioned as they come with birds hanging in the windows in season, and meat cut right in front of you. It's on Mount Street in Mayfair opposite the Connaught, just down from Nicky Clarke's. Of course there's always the Borough Market and famrers markets you can find here: http://www.lfm.org.uk/.
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