Great food on a budget

Although we love making crazy or gourmet meals, there's always been a focus on food that fits well in a smaller budget at Six-Seven-Eight. Lately we've had to ramp up our budget constraints and stretch food out across multiple meals due to very large, unexpected medical bills. Eating on the cheap doesn't have to mean Ramen noodles and frozen pizzas though. As we'll show below, you can be frugal at the grocery store and still eat exciting meals that please the whole family.

While experimenting with making less food last longer, we came upon a way to stretch one main meal into three dinners based on what meat happened to be on sale at the time.  We've now done this two different ways, both involving chicken. For the first week, we started with a whole chicken on sale for $4, then turned the bones into stock for a delicious soup, and finally used the leftover meat for a restaurant-worthy pasta. We've already gone over a couple of great ways to make whole chicken in previous blogs, like our lemon chicken baked in dough or the "Beer Butt" chicken, or even just simply mixing butter and seasonings and rubbing them under the chicken's skin.

For the second week (focused on in the pictures below), we started with clearance drumsticks ($2.87) at the grocer's meat department that needed to be used that day. First we had a fantastic grilling experience, then turned the leftovers into an impromptu rice dinner, and finally ended with more flavorful stock.

Below you can see us marinating the drumsticks in three different bags as we wanted to try a couple different versions. One had buffalo sauce, one had barbecue sauce (when these sauces aren't on sale at the grocery store they can frequently be found at the Dollar Tree), and one was a new "Firecracker" recipe we found in a Guy Fieri cookbook down at the local library.  You can find the full recipe here. This is a recipe that's easy to use substitutions for, as we discovered while we were cooking that we were all out of honey and didn't have the garlic-chilli sauce, so in their place we went with light corn syrup and our own blend of seasonings.

After marinating for the afternoon, they went onto the hot grill and started the delicious process of blackening.

To round out this particular meal we decided to also grill our vegetables. Taking a page from a fun meal my mom used to make, we put together "potato packets" that consist of sliced potato wedges, red bell pepper, and onions (although you can use any veggies you'd like in here). They are then tossed with a small amount of olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

The entire mixture is spooned out onto tin foil, which is then wrapped up tightly and placed onto the grill.  Because of the potatoes these take a good deal longer to cook through fully than most meats, so I recommend putting them on the grill immediately once the fire starts and before the charcoals turn white.

Here's our amazing finished meal of grilled drumsticks and potato packets.  Because a 10 pound bag of potatoes was on sale that week for $2, the whole meal ended up costing only a couple of dollars, tasted as good as anything you'd eat at a barbecue joint, and was able to be stretched out with the leftovers across two more meals.  For a more authentic barbecue style meal, adding corn on the cob would also be a great way to go.

Here's a picture of the early stages of the stock we made with the whole chicken. If you haven't made stock before, it's incredibly easy and can be frozen to pull out on the fly for a delicious range of soups.  For stock, simply cook up whatever veggies strike your fancy (typically carrots, onions, and garlic) and then throw in the leftover bones and fill the pot with water.  Let it simmer for several hours and then strain out the veggies and bones.  For our whole chicken, we covered the chicken in tin foil but left it in the pan when we put in the fridge. That way by the next morning all the fat and grease had congealed at the bottom of the pan and went into the stock with the bones, resulting in an amazingly flavorful stock that was essentially a soup on it's own.

The first week we turned the stock into a unique cheese soup, also taken from a Guy Fieri cookbook. What was great about the soup is that it didn't end up tasting (or looking!) like a bowl of nacho cheese soup, and instead had an earthy taste and texture that pairs great with beer and pretzels.  We of course made our own pretzels at home, which always end up both less expensive and more flavorful than store bought. You can check out our previous blog covering the amazing pretzels here. Unfortunately we somehow missed out taking pictures of the soup creation, but you can check out a video of a similar soup being made below. For the second week, the stock had a much spicier flavor, having been made with the bones of the grilled drumsticks, so we used it like the sauce that would go with a French dip and dipped bagel sandwiches into it.



So that covers the chicken itself and the stock, but what about the third meal?  Well, we still had plenty of meat leftover after the first night of eating, so the leftover meat got shredded off the bones before the stock was made. For the whole chicken, we sliced the meat into strips along with veggies leftover from other meals that week to create a colorful pasta dish.

Here's the peppers, onions, and chicken all being sauteed together in a skillet over medium heat.

Everything then got spooned on top of spaghetti (although this would be fantastic with fettuccine or any other pasta) with a home-made alfredo sauce.  There are dozens of great alfredo recipes available online, but we've found that alfredo is best when it's done simply with no more than four or five ingredients.  We'll be getting into the aflredo recipe in greater detail in a later blog, when we cover a clone cooking night as we try to make our own versions of Olive Garden favorites.

For the leftover meat from the drumsticks, we tossed the meat with the remaining firecracker sauce, soy sauce, and a few veggies and then spooned it all out over rice for a fun Asian themed meal (sorry about the lack of a picture, I was having so much fun with that night I somehow forgot to pull out the camera!)