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. We first did this in 2017 (some of the info is still in this blog post below!) where the challenge was simple – could we turn £15 worth of ingredients from Tesco into 15 meals for two people? Now updated for 2025, the challenge cost under £20.

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 less than £20 of ingredients into 15 meals for two people.

Why we chose chicken

Chicken is one of those really versatile products that can go into a lot of meals (you might like these chicken recipes). It is also a cheaper way of getting a lean protein into your diet. A chicken is also one of the cheapest meats you can use for your Sunday roast dinner, giving you plenty of leftovers for making more meals over the week.

Top tip – don't want to eat chicken every day for the next week? Cut up the leftovers and freeze them into portions to use later in the month.

How Long Does Cooked Chicken Last In The Freezer?

If you are planning to freeze your cooked chicken then you can expect it to last up to 6 months in the freezer.

Be sure to plan a meal or meals to use it up before those 6 months are up. I've also learned from experience to label it so that you aren't playing ‘guess the frozen package' in a month's time.

Full list of ingredients bought

25th February 2025 from Tesco

• Large Whole Chicken – £4.20
• 2kg bag of Potatoes – £1.35
• 1kg bag of Carrots – 69p
• 900g bag of Garden Peas – 99p
• 3 Individual Onions – 21p each – 63p total
• 3 Individual Peppers – 59p each – £1.77 total
• Garlic Clove – 55p
• 200g tin of Sweetcorn – 49p
• 500g bag of Penne Pasta – 69p
• 1kg bag of Long Grain Rice – 52p
• 12 Free Range Eggs – £2.70
• 8 pack of Wraps – 99p
• 400g block of Cheese – £2.69
• 500g Passata – 55p

Final Cost = £18.81

February 2017 Costs

Back in 2017, 17th February (if we are being exact) when this post was first written and posted, using the same and similar items would have instead cost:

• 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

2017's Final cost = £15.30

I must say how fascinating it is seeing how different the packaging is and the differences in prices after only 8 years. Prices of these ingredients haven't increased that much, all things considered, and I was shocked to find that the price of the whole chicken went down!

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!

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:

1. Peeled the potatoes with a knife and not a potato peeler (so that there was some flesh on the skins)
2. Laid them out on a baking tray – they don't have to be neat!
3. Sprayed with Frylight and seasoned with salt and pepper
4. Baked in the oven for 20-25 minutes
5. 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, whilst also doing as much as possible to save money grocery shopping. This post really shows you just how much you can make chicken stretch.

If you liked this, you might like these 7 things to do with broccoli.