2+ meals and bone broth from a $5 Costco chicken

I'm happy I can eat chicken again because I love those $5 rotisserie chickens from Costco. While I was pregnant I could barely stand to have chicken in the house, even if it was just in the freezer.

We got a rotisserie chicken on Monday. On Wednesday I took it out of the fridge and picked most of the meat off to make chicken rice soup.

The chicken soup I make is embarrassingly simple, because some people in our family can't stand carrots and I'm not crazy enough about celery to buy it often. All I do is boil some rice in chicken broth and shake in some garlic powder, onion powder, dried parsley, salt, and pepper. Depending on how salty the chicken broth is I might not even need more salt. In this case I was using a bag of bone broth I had in the freezer, watered down a little bit. Then I add the chopped up pieces of rotisserie chicken and simmer until the rice is done. This time we used brown rice, but brown rice does take a lot longer to cook than white rice.

So that was meal number one from the Costco chicken. Another easy meal we sometimes do with a rotisserie chicken is boil some fettucini pasta and mix the noodles with the chopped chicken, and add some heavy cream, grated parmesan, and salt and pepper for an almost effortless version of fettucini Alfredo. We didn't do that this time, but it would have been just as easy.

While I was making the chicken soup I put the rotisserie chicken carcass into the crock pot to make bone broth. Along with the chicken I cut a large sweet onion into eighths and put that in, plus a handful or two of baby carrots, and some quartered mushrooms. I just happened to have all of those in the fridge. I don't think there's any strict rules about what vegetables you have to cook in your bone broth. If I had bell peppers or celery I'm sure I would have tried using those. Then I filled the crock pot up to the brim with water, which turned out to be about three quarts. I added a spoonful of minced garlic and a generous amount of salt and pepper. Then I turned the crock pot on low to cook overnight. It ended up simmering for about 12 or 15 hours. By then the bones were getting all crumbly, which is what you want.

I turned the crock pot off and let it cool for an hour or so. The kids and I had the leftover chicken rice soup for lunch. I fished all the mushrooms and carrots out of the broth and we ate those too. They were delicious after cooking in the broth all night. After lunch I strained the broth and put it in quart jars to store in the fridge. I picked the rest of the meat off the bones for our second meal. After the meat has cooked all night in the broth it's colored dark but it is very good. The kids love it.

The second meal we had from the chicken was chicken broccoli rice. I have looked up recipes for this before to make it, but I finally realized to make it taste the way I wanted, I needed to make up my own recipe.

Here's what I did:

I took 2 1/2 cups of washed rice and sauteed it in a tablespoon of butter for a few minutes. White rice this time, because I had to leave for choir practice and didn't have time for brown rice. I poured in about 2/3rds of a quart jar of bone broth, probably something like 2 1/2 cups. I let the rice simmer covered in the skillet for awhile while I washed dishes. When most of the liquid had been absorbed and the bottom of the rice was starting to get toasted on the bottom of the skillet, the rice still wasn't quite done, so I poured in most of the rest of the quart jar of broth and let it simmer some more.

Then I got a pack of frozen broccoli out of the freezer and partially thawed it in the microwave. I didn't want it completely thawed and mushy, but I didn't want it frozen rock solid either. I used my mini food processor to chop the broccoli into tiny pieces. For some reason I don't like huge chunks of broccoli in this dish. Then I mixed the broccoli and the chicken meat I had picked off the bones earlier in with the rice. I grated a generous amount of cheddar cheese -- maybe 2-3 cups of grated cheese -- and mixed that in. Most of the liquid had absorbed now but since the cheese, meat and broccoli had cooled off the rice quite a bit, I continued to heat it on the stove for a minute or two, because I wanted to serve it piping hot. Finally I added a little salt and pepper. Not too much, because the broth, the chicken, and the cheese already have salt. And that was it. Dinner was ready to serve.

So those were our two meals plus leftovers with our $5 rotisserie chicken, for a family of 6. I still have one full quart jar of bone broth in the refrigerator ready to use for something else.

I once read a blog post where the writer frowned on buying the Costco chickens, saying they don't contain much nutrition. But in times like these I think you have to do what it takes to feed your family and I feel happy that we got our money's worth out of this one. (Another one of my favorite bloggers, Chels at Catz in the Kitchen, loves the rotisserie chickens and buys them frequently just to have the cooked meat ready in the freezer, so clearly opinions are divided.)