Interconnecting Meals

In our recent blog entries about eating great food on a budget and keeping Easter leftovers going, we explored a few ways to have several meals based one around one main meat or vegetable to save money and stretch out food across several dinners. We briefly mentioned a stock that was made by using the bones from whole roast chicken or grilled chicken drumsticks, and now we'll go a little more in-depth into how to make an amazing stock that can either be used for a soup the next day, or frozen and saved for any number of meals down the line.

To start a stock, chop a few vegetables, like onions and celery. These don't need to be diced small or even be uniform in size, as they are only there to add flavor and won't be directly eaten (although you could definitely take them out of the stock afterwards to use immediately, such as by adding them to roasted potatoes).

To get the most flavor from the vegetables, cook the onion, celery, and carrots in a small amount of oil for a few minutes until they are just turning soft.

At this point we threw in sliced garlic cloves and the leftover bones, fat, and skin from the roasted whole chicken we made for Easter dinner. Everything is mixed together thoroughly and then seasoned with some red pepper flakes a few whole peppercorns.

Fill your pan up with water and allow the stock to cook for several hours until all the flavors have properly mingled. This is a basic stock to use as a base for just about any type of soup, but you can jazz this up in different ways depending on what you want to make. For instance, the stock could be taken in a more Mexican direction by throwing in cilantro and cumin. You can also find a good stock recipe from Alton Brown at this location. By using the leftover chicken carcasses, in addition to the other meals mentioned in recent blogs, we ended up getting around five days worth of lunches and dinners out of our Easter feast.

There are plenty of ways to interconnect the ingredients from your weekly shopping trip into multiple meals besides just reusing bones for stock. Last week I wanted to get peanuts for a salad, but we needed to find another way to use a bag of peanuts to save on cost. Taking a look through our pantry we noticed we had a bag of rice, and then checking the meal list we saw we would have several different peppers and veggies for other meals. Putting all our ingredients together, we decided to make an Asian rice bowl.

Here are the main ingredients for the bowl, featuring bright reds and oranges from bell peppers, along with both hot and sweet flavors from green onions, banana pepper, poblano pepper, and finally some sliced mushrooms to add a bit of a meaty texture.

Here I'm slicing up pieces of chicken (amazingly still from those Easter birds - they lasted forever and were a steal on sale for 79 cents a pound!) and you can also see the shelled peanuts.

All the vegetables are getting a quick cooking on the skillet to soften up and mingle their flavors together.

To add an Asian twist, here's Megan pouring in both teriyaki and soy sauce to the cooking veggies.

And in the last few minutes of cooking, the peanuts get tossed in for a fun crunch to offset the texture of the rice.

The finished vegetable/chicken/peanut mixture is spooned over a bowlful of white rice and then tossed with extra soy and even a little teriyaki hot sauce.

But what about the salad that started this whole adventure? This one went a very different direction and was sweet instead of savory with apple, croutons, and of course the peanuts. 

To match the flavor of the fruits and nuts I used a cranberry walnut dressing, but poppy seed or any other sweet style dressing would work equally well for this great change-of-pace salad.

Every now and again we like to hit the supermarket on weekday evenings to check for clearance lunch meat or other deli offerings that need to be used up right away. The deli department at many stores mark down their hot food prices at the end of the evening, which can result in some really great deals as long as you are willing to use up the food the same or next day. Recently we found a $5 package of chicken strips for $1.50, and managed to make several different fun meals out of it we wouldn't normally eat.

Here I'm putting together another salad, with crunchy fresh green beans, red bell pepper, jalapeno, green onion, and pieces from one chicken strip.

The different textures, flavors, and colors from the meats and veggies gives a stunning presentation for a salad that's actually rather simple. The chicken strip chunks really made the salad more exciting and filling, and the meal was much healthier than just eating the chicken strips by themselves with dipping sauce.

To take this up to the next level, I also grated some hot pepper cheese on top, but mozzarella or sharp cheddar would do nicely as well.

For the dressing I went with a lite caesar, but honey mustard would make a great flavor combination with the chicken strips and red peppers.

The honey mustard idea got me thinking that I wanted something similar to the salad, but in a sandwich format. Here I've sliced up avacado, tomato, poblano pepper, and cheddar. I took two chicken strips and sliced them both in half lengthwise so they perfectly covered a large slice of bread.

I melted the cheddar on top of the chicken, spread out some honey mustard dressing on the bread, and then layered on all the veggies with a bit of lettuce.

This was one heck of a sandwich, easily on par with what you might get on a restaurant's lunch menu, and something I'll definitely make again to play around with different ingredients.

And now I sign off so we can get started on our Olive Garden clone night, where we will make soup, salad, pasta, and bread sticks mimicking that restaurant's style. Coming up soon we also have blogs covering how to make the perfect cheesecake, comparing different peppers and how to use them, and a hop scotch between meals from different countries to get more variety in our cooking adventures.