How far can you make chicken stretch? My wife and I pondered this and we thought that with the combined power of meal planning, batch cooking and a budget, we were going to see how far we could make a chicken stretch. The challenge was simple – could we turn £15 worth of ingredients from Tesco into 15 meals for two people?
Meal Planning
Making your ingredients stretch into multiple meals then you will need a meal plan. Check out my post on how to meal plan for more information on meal planning. My aim was to spend as little as possible but also making as many meals as possible with ingredients that would be used in multiple meals but also be readily available to anyone. We wanted to avoid food waste as much as possible. Although we know you can get the ingredients a little cheaper from Aldi or Lidl, we decided to get our ingredients from Tesco, so that this post is relevant to lots of people – even those who haven't ventured into discount supermarkets! We did decide that we would use a selection of store cupboard ingredients, which you can find a list of below. The great thing about this experiment is that none of the ingredients were reduced – this means that anyone can turn £15 of ingredients into 15 meals for two people.
Full list of ingredients bought
- 1 whole chicken – £5.50
- Potatoes – £1.29
- Carrots – 45p
- Peas (frozen) – 69p
- Red Onions – 69p
- Peppers – 78p
- Garlic clove – 30p
- Sweetcorn (tinned) – 35p
- Pasta – 30p
- Rice – 45p
- Eggs (Free-range) – £1.75 (You can get the eggs cheaper but we would rather use free-range)
- Wraps – £1
- Cheese – £1.40
- Passata – 35p
Final cost = £15.30
Batch cooking to make chicken stretch
This was a hard yet very fun day in which Emma and myself were in the kitchen for several hours cooking and preparing all the meals that we could.
The chicken needed to be cooked first, since after all, it was the main ingredient to all of the meals we had planned, before allowing it to cool. We wanted to get the meat off first simply so we could see how much meat we would have left over to do meals with, as such I could do one of my favourite meal preparation activities which is cutting and pulling apart the chicken (making the chicken talk in a silly voice and singing is optional but I like to have fun). The legs were used for a delicious roast dinner (with Yorkshire puddings of course), leaving us with the breast, wings and other areas to cut off and break up into amounts for the meals. Even the bones were put to use after being stripped, thrown into pan with water and boiled for soup.
We had our meat and it was more than enough for the meals that we had planned, meaning that we could truly crack on with our batch cooking for the day!
https://www.instagram.com/p/BQh9khlD0im/
Everything was in full go boiling the chicken bones, pasta and the rice. Chopping vegetables and mixing ingredients.
Since our freezers are still full up as most will know from reading my February goals & January results post we chose to give away the meals we made to family, something that you don't have to do when batch cooking since many of the meals you could keep in the fridge for a few days and be frozen for much longer.
The meals we made from one whole chicken
Each meal that we planned to do had to of course use chicken but also each ingredient had to be used at least twice across the meals to make as little wasted ingredients as possible. Several meals were rejected simply due to having to buy extra ingredients that wouldn't easily fit with the other meals or that used a lot of cupboard items that people wouldn't normally have.
We did this experiment with the assumption that you have the following store cupboard or staples in your kitchen:
- Milk
- Flour
- Yeast
- Spices and seasoning
Gravy is something that you can make buy just collecting the juices from the chicken, adding flour and boiling.
Here's a list of all the meals we made, separately into lunch and dinners (let's not start the Drew household debate of whether lunch is “lunch” or “dinner”. Here I mean lunch and the evening meal).
Lunches:
- Chicken pasta salad x 2 servings
- Chicken soup x3 servings
- Chicken wraps x2 servings
- Chicken egg fried rice x2 servings
Dinners:
- Chicken roast dinner with Yorkshire puddings
- Chicken pasta
- Chicken stir fry
- Chicken hot pot or chicken casserole
- Chicken jambalaya
- Chicken pizza & wedges
What's more, we also got a bonus snack out of it! Emma used the potato peelings to make this delicious snack.
Here's how she made it:
- Peeled the potatoes with a knife and not a potato peeler (so that there was some flesh on the skins)
- Laid them out on a baking tray – they don't have to be neat!
- Sprayed with Frylight and seasoned with salt and pepper
- Baked in the oven for 20-25 minutes
- Grated cheese on the top is optional but delicious.
Leftover ingredients
After all that cooking we still have leftover ingredients all ready for other meals. I am thinking of a cheesy omelette for breakfast as a little treat for Emma one morning.
- Cheese
- Onions
- Rice
- Pasta
- Carrots
- Eggs
- Garlic
- Peas
I absolutely loved this challenge, it was incredibly fun to do and I feel that we didn't scrimp out on our serving sizes or amounts of chicken. This post shows you just how much you can make chicken stretch.
If you liked this, you might like these 7 things to do with broccoli.
The soup looks lush. Well impressed !!!!! Xx
Would love the recipes for some of these!
This Idea would be an amazing youtube video
Don’t put corn in jambalaya please
That is some clever use of chicken!
Oh wow, you really did make it stretch, yet still plenty for each dish, we prefer to shpp at Lidl although we get mostly fresh and cupboard food from there we get quite a lot of our frozen food from farm foods which is just opposite our Lidls, and a home bargains two doors up, we are a family of 5 and I need to start meal planning, we waste so much food every week were I over portion and throw away half packs of things which could be used for different meals if only a did a meal plan each week xx
Sounds like got an awesome little shopping area to play with food wise there. Our local is Sainsburys opposite an Aldi with a Tesco on the outskirts. Though if we head up to Kings Lynn, where we film Poundland every month, we have a Lidl, Morrisions, Farm Foods and Home Bargains, as well as the other three to chose from haha
Meal planning can be a bit difficult sometimes as we all have busy lives, with a family of 5 can imagine you definitely have your hands full. But once it gets down into a habit it can be great money and food saver.
If you have the time try doing a little kitchen inventory first to see what you have already, always surprising whats at the back of a cupboard, and then move onto doing a meal plan.
Maybe get the rest of the family involved as well, can help it go faster with meal ideas and feel more a part of it, plus they can then look forward to what they chosen.
What a superb idea! Really impressed with this! I’m definitely going to give this a go! I’d love to see another post like this with other meats!
Well done – great ideas
Great stuff(ing) 🙂
Very impressed with the selection of meals you came up with, and still had leftovers.
Well done, it just shows what you can do with a bit of thought and planning. I am going to try some of these dishes.
Very cleverly done!
Great stuff all from one chicken will be trying these .Fab
I seriously need to give this a go! And I thought I was good at getting meat to stretch farther! Good job and the food you made look fab!
Again proving how much we waste today and also how much we buy which isbt necessary too. Some great tips and meals
Excellent ideas. I thought I was thrifty with food, but your ideas have inspired me to save even more money. Thank you
Interestign blog, thank you
Usually from Lidl I buy Chicken thighs, cook them, take skin off, pull them apart and make 3 meals from them. But it’s a messy process (hubby used to do it). But now I’m on my own, I buy the Chicken thigh fillets. So no skin or bones which is easier for me. I made two meals out of them this week. But I had big portions. So really could have made 3 meals or 3 meals and a sandwich