I bought a 10 lb. turkey right after Thanksgiving for $0.48/lb.

What does a family of three get out of a turkey?

I had considered cutting it up and just using it as I would diced chicken, but I’m actually pretty fond of roast turkey, so I actually did just go ahead and roast the whole bird. It’s easy, doesn’t take long and my whole family is fond of roast poultry. I have a family of three – two adults and a teenaged boy. Let’s keep count of how many meals I got from Tom.

We had roast turkey one day. One meal for all of us. I cut up some of the roast meat to use in bentos the next day. That brings it up to two meals.

Then I used my Great Big Crock Pot to make enough Turkey Curry for three dinners family dinners and lunch one day for everyone in the family. That brings the count up to six meals.

Today, I put all the leftover meat and the bones in the Great Big Crock Pot again to make stock. Tonight we’re having Turkey and rice soup with enough left over for two more meals. That brings it up to nine meals. But there was still enough meat left over to freeze to use in a casserole, Turkey Pot Pie or some other meals. That brings it up to ten meals and I still have two quarts of turkey stock left over to use in soups, or whatever I feel like using stock for.

Not bad for one bird.

Here’s some of the recipes, just substituting turkey for chicken.

Chicken Pot Pie

This is an insanely easy dish. It also freezes well, as long as you make sure to drain the veggies very well.

Chicken Curry

This is actually a perfect crock pot meal, for anyone who uses that most wonderful of kitchen implements.  You have to have either a blender or a food processor for this recipe. 

I’ve been experimenting, and this is what I’ve come up with.  I expect I’ll perfect it as time goes on.  This recipe makes a LOT.  It’s good for company or if you like to have leftovers.  If you don’t have a 6 qt crock pot, you should cut this recipe in half. This freezes great.

In my last post about Feed the Freezer cooking, I outlined a plan to make several meals both for dinners this week and to freeze ahead. Because I’m definitely into continuous improvement, after I took a look at the plan, I saw some minor faults.

I’m lazy. If there’s an easy way to do something, yes, that’s the way I’m going to do it.

The fault in my plan? I had planned to make about 24 burritos. It takes about an hour and is the most time-intensive part of this particular plan. Still, an hour of work for several meals isn’t that bad a payoff. It’s just that I’ve got paying work scheduled for tomorrow, and since it’s teaching, I’m going to be on my feet all day. What I really should do is set up a crock pot meal for tomorrow.

So I have.

I went ahead and browned four pounds of hamburger with onions, garlic, hot chili peppers, cumin and other spices. Half of it went into the crock pot with beans, a bit of wine and crushed tomatoes to cook all day tomorrow while I’m slaving away. The other half was made into burritos for dinner tonight and burritos to freeze. This still only took about an hour to do, so in the long run it saved a bit of time.

This week of preparing meals ahead is going really well. I have a couple of family meals worth of spaghetti sauce frozen, two family meals worth of curry, and two family meals worth of burritos. I’ve also got my meat sauce for my lasagna already prepared, so all I’ll have to do on Lasagna Day is mix up the cheeses and assemble the thing.

If you do this sort of thing, paying attention to labeling is important, but it’s not a bad idea to go one step further and write up some instructions on reheating or baking. I used a sharpie to write cooking/re-heating instructions on the freezer bags that I have the meals stored in. Hey, I’m not the only one that cooks and if you’re not making it easy to get it right, you’re being mean and setting people up.

I made something of a mistake in planning that is actually fortuitous. Most of the recipes I am using were scaled for a household of six (my household now has three people) with planned leftovers for lunches. What this really means is that it that I’m making more meals than I’d originally thought I was making.

When I do freezer cooking, I don’t feel bound to use those freezer meals on any particular plan, though. The idea is to have these meals in reserve so that when I don’t feel like cooking – say I’ve had a long day, or I’ve got other things I’d rather do, I don’t have to decide between forcing myself to cook and spending too much money on the Magic Sushi Phone. I like cooking. Mostly, I find making dinner at night a pleasant way to wind down in anticipating of spending a bit of time over dinner talking with my family.

It’s just that I don’t want to be bound to it when there are other things going on that might be more important or more urgent.

While you might not necessarily want to spend an entire day making thirty meals for Once a Month Cooking (and I don’t blame you. I’ve done it and it’s hard work), I can’t encourage you enough to try to make some double or triple batches of meals that freeze well to put away for busy times. It takes about 20% more time than making each meal individually, so you’re talking a real time savings in terms of kitchen time. Sure, sure, maybe you cook to relax and that’s cool. I do. But I have interests and obligations outside of cooking and I know in a week or so, when business starts getting busy again, I’ll be deeply grateful that I did this.

While I’ve done Once A Month Cooking before, I don’t always do it that way. It takes about a weekend to do a serious OAMC session and sometimes I have other things I prefer to do on a weekend and don’t want to take the time. Sometimes I’ll sneak up on freezer cooking.

I’m anticipating getting kind of busy in the next few weeks, so I want to have some easy meals on hand. I’m also kind of busy getting a wardrobe capsule sewn, a class to prepare for, another class to write… You get the idea. I have a lot to do. I might like cooking, but after a long day, I like the option of not cooking. I could dump some of the chore on my husband, but he’s healing from surgery, so that’d hardly be a kind thing to do. I could also dump some on my son, but I want him to focus on his school and I’d rather he shovel the driveway than me. So, I’ve snatched the easy (for me) job of being the cook.

I do have some cooking software (Mastercook) that has a lot of household favorites that I’d written up while teaching my son to cook. I just grabbed a few of the recipes for the week planned mostly around hamburger (there was a local sale), generated a shopping list from them and heighed me to the store with my son to lay in supplies for my cooking plan.

So, this is my plan for the week. It will generate 16 dinners (yes, with repeats) in six days of cooking:

Sunday

I’ll be cooking a turkey I got really cheaply just after the holidays. I’ll cook that up, and we’ll have a turkey dinner tonight. Then tomorrow I’ll get all the leftover meat off the turkey and package it up to use like I’d use chicken in meals.

Monday

Spaghetti. I’ll be hauling out my Great Big Crock Pot and make an enormous pot of marinara sauce. Some of this will be frozen for spaghetti sauce.

Tuesday

The GBCP will be in use again as I make a really large curry. Instead of the chicken I usually use, I’ll put a couple of pounds of turkey meat into it. We’ll have curry for dinner, I’ll freeze enough curry for another dinner, and use some of the rest for lunches.

Wednesday

And again, the GBCP will prove its worth. I’ll make a huge chili. We’ll enjoy chili for dinner, then we’ll freeze some for meals.

Thursday

The GBCP gets a rest today. I’ll make a double batch of burritos – enough for two dinners and two bentos for the family.

Friday

Lasagna. It’s just as fast to make two lasagnas as one, so I’ll make one, then freeze one. A lasagna is enough for a couple of dinners and lunches in my house and we’re not freaky about making sure we have to have a different meal every single night, so this is a good Friday meal.

Saturday

I’ll go shopping again this weekend, but will plan my meals around another meat. I’ll probably see if my son is interested enough in having a pizza to make one and I will show him the wonders of having some sauce frozen and ready for him to use. (Bwahahaha! Yes, I’m going to be teaching him my mad cooking skilz). The next week, I’ll probably make up a series of poultry-based meals using up the turkey I made. The carcass (which will have been carefully frozen) will be thawed to make stock, so certainly one of the meals I make will be a soup.

I do freeze ahead meals for a couple of reasons. One, this kind of thing, especially when incorporating the crock pot, saves time. It doesn’t take twice as long to make two lasagnas as it does one, nor does it take any more time to make up a huge pot of spaghetti sauce or curry than it does to make a small one. That means that for the time it took me to make one meal, I get two. Cooking up some rice or pasta takes no real time at all.

But the other reason I do it is that this really saves money. When you plan meals carefully and cook in bulk, you wind up saving 30-50% on your food bill.¹ My shopping trip today (even taking the turkey into account) to make two weeks’ worth of dinners didn’t cost any more than I’d spend on food for one week were I not doing the freeze ahead thing, and planning with such care.

But to really make this work, you do need to do two mores things

Wrap and Label Your Food

You’re not going to remember what you have in the freezer, and if you’ve wrapped it properly, chances are slim you’ll be able to tell what it is you have in that block of ice. Do yourself a favor – wrap the food well so that you don’t lose all that hard work and planning to freezer burn. Sharpies are cheap. You can write what you’ve frozen, date it, and even add some cooking directions if you want for household members who won’t necessarily remember how to prepare what you’ve got there. (A good rule of thumb is to add 50% cooking time to a casserole, ferinstance, if you’re not taking it out to thaw in the morning).

Keep a Freezer Inventory

Even if you do label everything like you’re supposed to, if you’ve stored lots of meals in the freezer, playing Freezer Tetris to find what you want to cook because you’ve forgotten everything you have in there is a pain. An easy thing to do would be to have a little printout with the food you have in the freezer. Other people who do freezer cooking have a small whiteboard on their freezer doors and just write down what they have. This also works great and had the added advantage of not killing trees. But however you do it, if you do any sort of freezer cooking, do make sure you keep a freezer inventory so that you can know what you have on hand.

If you have periods in your life where you’re busy, or know you’ll be very busy, I can’t encourage freezer cooking enough.

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¹ Unfortunately^, yes, this does fall under the Vimes Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness*. I have a car with a large trunk to buy in bulk, a good place to store the food, money enough to tie up a fair amount of money in frozen food, good kitchen equipment (Big crock pots and good knives) to make this sort of cooking reasonable. No, I don’t have a huge freezer, but you don’t need one. No, I’m serious, you don’t. You just need to play a little freezer Tetris.

*The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.  – Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett

I’ve talked about buying whole chickens before. Cutting them into parts is not a real big deal, but you may get parts you don’t ordinarily use for much. Sure, sure, we all like the chicken breast to make our lovely meals, or roast the legs on the grill, but what the heck do you do with the backs and necks?

Make stock?

Of course, but there’s a fair bit of useable meat on a chicken back.

Make soup?

Sure. There’s no reason not to. But another thing you can do is make chicken-n-dumplins. It’s not only a really frugal meal, it’s great comfort food in the middle of the winter.

Chicken-n-dumplins

For the soup, sauté the carrots, onions and celery in butter until the onions are translucent, then add the stock and the rest of the soup ingredients. Cook for about 20 minutes. While this is simmering, make up your dumplings. Stir together flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt bowl. Cut in butter until crumbly. Stir in milk to make a soft dough. Bring soup to a boil, then drop by spoonfuls into boiling stew. Cover, turn down the heat and simmer 15 minutes without lifting lid (the steam is what makes the dumplings fluffy, so you don’t want to let that escape). Serve.

I bought another turkey yesterday.  You’d think since we haven’t finished eating the Thanksgiving turkey, that my household would have enough of the oversized bird to be going on with.

And fair enough, we’re unlikely to be eating this bird any time soon. He’s taking up a large portion of my freezer.  But I’m okay with that, as this is the time to buy a turkey.  Friends, if you have the freezer space and tend to be creative with your poultry cooking, now’s the time!  I got mine for about $0.49/lb.  Let’s just say that’s a lot less than I usually pay for meat! I’ve talked about saving money buying whole chickens.  Well, this principle works with turkeys just fine!

I’ll be unlikely to be roast the whole thing this time, unless it turns out I wind up hosting some big do between now and the middle of January where a turkey would be appropriate.  No, what I’ll do in a few weeks is thaw this baby, debone it, and store the meat in the freezer.  Then yes, I’ll make stock.

Then, I’ll use the meat just like I’d use boneless chicken meat — stir frys, a puttanesca-style dish I make, cooked in red wine, you name it.  If I had a meat grinder, why yes, I’d be using turkey to make meals that call for ground beef.  If any of you do this, I’d love to hear how it works out.

If you’re looking to save money and have the freezer space, jump on this one.

The beginnings of the goodness

I make Turkey Carcass Soup whenever I’ve hosted Thanksgiving dinner.  It’s easy to make, delicious, and is a frugal way to use the entire turkey.

Even if you’re not necessarily into poultry soups, I can’t encourage you enough to make stock from your leftover turkey carcass.   Turkey stock is incredibly rich and can be a great addition to many dishes improved by a bit of stock.  Rice cooked in stock is delicious, using a bit in sautéing many vegetables will definitely kick it up a notch.  And, of course, if you’re fond of soups, it’s deliciously rich.

One of the mistakes a lot of people make when they make a stock from a carcass is to heat the water before they put in the bones, or to heat the water too quickly.  You don’t want to do that, as you won’t get as much gelatin from the bones that way.  A fantastic way to avoid that is to put the cold bones in cold water in a crock pot, then turn it on low and forget about it until the delicious smell draws you to the kitchen.

Obviously, I’m not using that method today.  Many moons ago, my mother gave me a pasta pot. You know the kind with the colander-like insert?  It fits a turkey after you’ve taken off the meat that’ll be good for sandwiches or stir fries, and it makes getting the bones out of the hot stock much easier.  But I’ve got my burner on a fairly low temp to heat the water slowly.

Yes, I’ll be making soup for dinner tonight.  A lighter meal after the excesses of Thanksgiving is always a good choice.  Tonight, it’s going to be basic. Carrots, celery, mushrooms, some onion and garlic with a bit of rosemary. Not sure what I’ll put in for a starch, but pasta, rice or potatoes can all be good in this sort of soup.  I think that’s what I like most about doing this.  It’s intuitive.  Sure, sure you can find actual recipes for Turkey Carcass Soup online, but a lot of the fun for me is in rooting through the fridge and pondering what might be good this time.

However this will make much more stock than my family could possibly want for soup.  Sure, many soups freeze well, but I’ll probably use part of the stock to make soup for the family tonight, then freeze the rest for other uses.  Possibly turkey and dumplins will be in our near future.

If you like to cook and have never tried to make a carcass soup, today’s the perfect day.  If you do try it, let me know how it turned out!

I’m on rather an economy drive lately, but I like to eat well.

I’ve discovered a way to save a whole bunch of money on meat.  In my area, a boneless, skinless chicken breast runs over three bucks a pound when not on sale.  Even on sale you’ll never see it for less than about $1.99/lb.

I can pretty much count on one of the area grocery stores having a sale on whole chickens for between $0.89 and $0.99/lb most weeks.  Now, you might say that you get sick of a whole roast chicken all the time, and fair enough.  Sure, I do the thing where I roast a chicken, save some of the leftover meat for chicken salad, then make Garbage Soup out of what’s left every now and then, but it’s not all you can do with a whole chicken.

One thing I’d never done was cut up a whole chicken into its various parts.  If I was going to use the parts, I bought the chicken cut up.  Noticing how much cheaper the whole chicken often is, I decided I needed to learn to cut up my own.

I tried it yesterday, just because, well, I like learning new things.[1] I watched a video on Youtube about it, then on my very first try it took me something fewer than five minutes.  It might not be as cool or as pretty as a professional can do it, but it’s a large enough money savings, I’m all good doing this.  Yeah, it’s a little yucky, but I feel like if I’m willing to eat meat at all, I need to suck it up on the yucky anyway and get real that I’m eating an animal.

Now, not everything I make uses chicken with bones in.  In fact, a lot of it doesn’t.  Next time I find a good sale on chickens, I’m going to learn to debone the chicken.  I’ve been given to understand it’s fairly quick and easy.  I think Elliot Yan claims to be able to do it in 18 seconds, so I’m sure I can do it in a couple of minutes.  The next time I buy a chicken, I’ll debone it and possibly even portion it out already cut up for stir fries.[2]

I’ve seen people talk about the waste involved.  We don’t eat the bones! Who eats the wings?

No we don’t eat the bones, but I cook with chicken stock a whole bunch, and not just soups.   Rice made with chicken stock is delicious.  Beans and rice, jambalaya and many other dishes that use water have a richer flaver, and are more nutritious[3] with the stock anyway.  Bones and chicken backs make fine, tasty stock.  So, no, it’s not wasted.  I just save them in a bag in the freezer for the next time I’m going to make stock.

As far as the wings?  Don’t you ever have parties?  Buffalo wings, and variations thereof are pretty popular ‘round here.  I’m saving mine for the next party I throw.

It does take some time to cut up and repackage a whole chicken, but it doesn’t take that much and it’s not even hard.  If you’re looking for a way to save money on meat, I have to encourage you to give this a try.

[1] And next week, it might be a new programming language.  C’mon guys, I wasn’t kidding when I said it was my job to learn stuff then talk about it.

[2] Which will make my son happy for the nights he cooks.  He detests cutting up chicken.

[3] If you’re worried about calcium intake and are not big on dairy, this is another great way to get your calcium. When you make homemade stock, it leeches from the bones.

I’d mentioned that it is important to have a freezer inventory if you’re doing Freezer Cooking, Once a Month Cooking or the like.   You’d think you wouldn’t.  Surely you’ll remember all that work you went to when putting up that lasagna or soup, wouldn’t you?

Friends, you won’t.

Here’s a truncated example of the freezer inventory system I have.  I have a chart (made it in Excel, don’t snigger) listing the meals I make.   I have up to four check boxes for how many full family meals I have frozen.  An empty space means there’s no meal of that sort frozen.  A diagonal line sloping up to the right means I’ve added a meal.  The crossed line means I’ve used that meal, so it’s gone now.

This gets posted on the fridge, so that I can keep the list updated easily rather than wasting time and paper printing up a new one every time I add food to the freezer or heat up a frozen one.  Anyone can draw a diagonal line.  Anyone can heat up dinner, too.   This is a good system if more than one person in the house is serving meals.

I’d posted a survey in my LJ about cooking and cooking habits. It’s probably pretty skewed, as anyone who reads my stuff is going to be interested in cooking. They’d soon stop reading out of boredom, otherwise, as household management and cooking is a definite interest of mine.  (We all have to eat and live somewhere.  How about systems to streamline things so you’re comfortable?)

It got me to thinking.  When we go to the beach, we stay in a couple of condo units that are basically a large two-bedroom apartment, complete with a reasonably decent basic kitchen.    When we go, we cook in rather than eat out.  With 6-12 people together, restaurants are far, far too expensive to be practical for a week’s stay!

This year, my mother did all of the cooking, but one meal my brother made.  *wince*  I had a project due when I got back, but you know, I really should have made at least one or two dinners. (Don’t let me get out of cooking a couple of meals next year, Mom).

Here’s the thing — I learned about prepping ahead from Mom.  Since she was doing the cooking, this means that meals were often put on to cook slowly in the oven, or simmer slowly on the stove while we enjoyed an afternoon at the beach.  Come five or six in the evening, we’d come up to the unit and there would be a heavenly smell wafting through the corridors.  It brought comment from many of the other people who weren’t making dinner.  They would be going out, or calling in for pizza or some such.

I used to wonder why in the world this place didn’t have  a crock pot as standard equipment (I’d be lost without mine!) when I realized that 80% of the people there wouldn’t use them.

Honestly?  I’d always chalked it up to people not wanting to cook on vacation, rather than a daily habit in their regular lives.   When I was growing up, one cooked dinner most nights.  Mom worked a couple of evenings a week for a little while.  I was old enough (12 or almost 13 when she started), so I cooked.  This was a family tradition.  When she was a teenager and her mother worked full time, Mom was expected to get her brother and sisters together to make sure dinner was on the table when Nanny got home¹.  Cooking dinner was what one did. Working mom or not, somebody was cookin’ dinner.

But I have a question:  If you don’t cook, how in hell do you afford to feed your family?  I am hardly going to claim to be the world’s most frugal kitchen manager, mind you.  My family of three spends about four hundred dollars a month on groceries, so you can’t say I’m exactly cookin’ cheap.  (Those fresh veggies in the bento do add up!)  I don’t shop at dented can stores, I don’t clip coupons (it’s usually for pre-processed stuff I don’t use, anyway).  The only really frugal things I do are to look for cheap cuts of meat, eschew canned beans in favor of dry and cook from scratch for the most part.

I saw an advertisement in the grocery store bragging:  Meal for Four for Under $15! as if this were some sort of wonderful thing.  I started ranting at my shopping partner (I think it was my son that time), “Well, I would bloody well hope so!  Good God, what are people serving?”

Wondering if this was a knee-jerk response from sitting on my high horse, I got out my price book when I got home, and figured the price per serving for some of  my usual recipes.  Understand that this reflects the fact that I don’t pay more than $2.50/lb for meat.  I do watch sales. I don’t buy organic food hand-raised by virgin elves under the full moon, either, okay?  Making dinner for four usually costs me between $5.00 and $8.00.  How can you afford to spend much more on that?  My household isn’t poor, but we’re hardly wealthy, either.  How can you afford to spend fifteen bucks (or more, apparently) on a typical weeknight dinner?

If I didn’t cook from scratch, there’d be no way I could pull that off.

¹Stories about her explosive reaction if dinner were not ready when Nanny got home are now stuff of family legend.