The Whole Bird

whole-chicken

One of my goals during our stay in the Catskills has been to cook meals that can be easily repurposed into ingredients for future meals. When you’re cooking every day, being able to stretch your leftovers like so saves a ton of time and money.

There are few ingredients that can ‘stretch’ as far as a whole chicken. The one pictured above I roasted over a bed of onions and potatoes. (This is probably worth a separate post, but I roast chickens and turkeys breast side down so that the white meat cooks slower.)

The next day, I broke down the leftover chicken into dark meat, white meat, bones, and skin. I used the bones to make about two quarts of chicken pho broth, and then used said broth to make a curry gravy, which I ate over rice with fried chicken skin crumbles on top.

chicken-curry-gravy

We’ve had that curry for a few meals now, and still have a breast which will probably become chicken salad, and a quart of broth, which will be used to braise some beef short ribs.