Final Post: chicken and biscuits over gravy

First, a note: This will be my final post, for several reasons.  First, because I have said repeatedly that I'm running out of affordable, yet different dinner ideas.  I've done over 50 dinners for under $10 each.  Second, because the purpose of this blog (for me anyway) was to keep me writing during a slump.  I'd written a book under a pseudonym, published it two years ago, and hadn't written anything worth reading since then.  So, a fellow writer suggested keeping a blog just to keep me busy until I DID have a new idea.  Well, the slump is over, folks.  I've been working on a novel since August, am really excited about it, but haven't really had the time to write much (28 pages done in nearly 3 months is NOT good) and have been considering, for several weeks, ditching this project altogether so I'd have more time to work on my novel.  Lastly, and probably most importantly, google's "free" photo hosting service says I've reached my limit, and it won't allow me to upload any more photos without paying a service fee.  Ironically, I haven't used about 1/10th of the photos I've uploaded, and if I could "delete" them from the hosting service to make more room, I would, but I can't seem to figure out how...

So in a nutshell: 1) out of affordable dinner ideas, 2) writer's slump is over, and 3) no more (free) photo space.

So without any of the photos I took of tonight's dinner, here's the recipe and costs: (but it's much less fun this way)

First, I made the biscuits: 2 and 1/4 cups bisquick mixed with 2/3 cup milk, roll out on a floured board (I just use more bisquick) cut into circles, and bake at 450 for 8 minutes or so.

Second, cook chicken (I did a little more than a pound) in a frying pan.  I thawed the frozen chicken in the microwave, sliced the raw chicken into small chunks on a plate, and cooked them in a frying pan with just a little water to help them stay juicy.

Third, add gravy (I just bought a small can of chicken gravy for 88 cents when it was on sale a few weeks ago) to the pan of cooked chicken.

Pull the biscuits out of the oven, and cook a side dish of vegetables (I did a half a bag of frozen peas, purchased for $1.33, in the microwave with a Tbsp of butter for 4 minutes, stirring at 2)

For dessert, we had store-bought fudge-pops (generic, box of 12 for $3.29)

The prices were: $2.53 for the chicken: 1.16 lbs of boneless, skinless breast meat at $2.18/lb, 88 cents gravy, $1.05 worth of bisquick powder (I rounded up to 2.5 cups since I used bisquick instead of flour) and 16 cents for 2/3 cup of milk, plus 4 fudge pops (1/3 of the box of 12 = $1.10) brings our total to: $5.72

Again, sorry about the lack of photos.  I may or may not fiddle with this more and try to upload them.  Probably not.

white (and green) lasagna with (not Ceasar) salad

So I had said in a previous post that I didn't like to make lasagna anymore because it was one of my ex's favorites, and cooking it just reminded me that he was gone.  And yet, it IS delicious.  In fact, white lasagna was part of our wedding feast.  So here's how I make mine:  First, I pulled out some crazy cheap chicken, purchased this week.

This pack contained 3 breasts, and I only needed 2, but I boiled all 3, plus the one left over from another night, because I wanted some pre-cooked chicken for Sunday, when I will be making more chicken romaine wheat wraps for my daughter's seventh birthday party.  I then shredded it, first by dicing it with a steak knife, then by tearing it with my fingers (don't get all huffy; I washed my hands).  I put it in a bowl with 4 eggs, a handful (probably 1/2 cup) of frozen spinach, about 1/3 of a large onion, diced, and another 2 handfuls of frozen broccoli, diced.

While the chicken was cooking, I put a package of lasagna noodles in my jumbo cooking pot, covered them with water, added about 2 Tbsp (just eyeballed it) of vegetable oil to keep them from sticking together, and set them on the stove to boil.  They only take 7 minutes but I had to allow time for the water to heat up so I set the timer for 10.  I also turned on the oven to 400 degrees.

I pulled out all of the mozzerella cheese I could find without digging too deep into my deep freezer, which was 3 partial bags (having used some and frozen the rest "for later" like I often do) which probably totaled 3 cups.  I first 'greased' the pan with some Ragu alfredo sauce (LOVE this stuff, usually $3 or more but I bought a bunch when it was $2.50.  It was months ago, but it's a vacuum sealed glass jar, and can be stored for a while.) then added about 2 tsp of "jar garlic" and 2 tsp of poultry seasonings, then shook the jar to "stir" it.

When I layered the lasagna, I put down 4 noodle strips on the bottom, then a few Tbsp of the "seasoned" Ragu, a layer of "chicken/broccoli/spinach/rawegg" then a layer of cheese, but not much, since 1) that makes it a lot more fattening, but moreso because 2) I didn't have a whole lot of cheese, and I was spreading it thin.  Even so, we only did 2 layers before we ran out cheese.







So I pulled out some more expensive cheese: a finely shredded blend of mozzarella  provolone, Parmesan  Romano  fontine, and asiago.  In other words, 'fancy cheese'.  It was on sale for $3 a bag last week, but even so, I hated to use it on this when "regular mozzerella" would do.

The last layer was just noodles, then the remaining sauce, and the remaining cheese.








To make the salad, I just pulled out some more romaine lettuce, added some bacon bits, and started looking for my ceasar salad dressing.  I couldn't find it, though I searched high and low.  Literally.  So I finally pulled out this Sweet Vidalia Onion dressing I bought on sale for $2 a few weeks ago.  I used a little less than half a bottle, so I'm calling it 80 cents instead of a dollar.  It tasted good without any croutons, and I don't like them very much myself, so I didn't bother making any.

When dinner was served, it looked like this: 

Dessert was some Halloween candy, superbly discounted.  Original label: $7.99, then marked at half off for $3.99, then marked at 75% off at $1.99, which is what I bought them for.  These jellybeans came in individual packets of 5 or 6 each.  We just opened them all up and put them in a candy dish, then took "a handful" each for dessert.  I'm going to REALLY overestimate and say we ate half the bag, or $1 worth.  Even though I know we did not.

If you were slicing this pan into all-adult portions, a whole pan is cut into 12 pieces.  I know, because I've worked in Italian restaurants. So 4 adult portions would be 1/3 of a pan.  Since my youngest is not quite five, we only ate 1/4 of the pan as a family, but for the purposes of calculations, I will consider "a family of four" to eat 1/3 of the pan...

Time for totals: chicken was 2/3 of a pack that cost $3.92, one jar of Ragu alfredo at $2.50, one box of lasagna noodles, which vary in cost from week to week but usually cost between 1 and 3 dollars, and I probably bought for $2 or less, and since I tend to overestimate to stay on the safe side, we're going to call $2, four raw eggs (which are usually $1.90 a dozen, so this is 1/3 of that, or 63 cents), spinach and broccoli, which even combined wouldn't be 1/2 of a bag, which normally costs $2 or so, but the broccoli was on sale for $1 a bag last week (huzzah!), so to call it 50 cents would be over-estimating the amount used, but slightly under-estimating the cost of a whole bag.  The salad used about 1/4 of a head of romaine lettuce, which cost 98 cents this week (sale price still current at Costas, folks), and about 1/3 of a container of generic bacon bits ($1.20 at best buys across from Charles Cole), which brings our total to: One-third of the pan of lasagna, which contained: $2.61 (chicken) +  $2.50 (Ragu) + $2 (noodles) + 63 cents (raw egg) + 50 cents spinach and broccoli combined + 10 cents (a few tsps seasonings) = 1/3 of $8.34 =  $2.78 (lasagna) + 25 cents (lettuce) + 40 cents (bacon bits) + 80 cents (salad dressing) + $1 dessert 

= $5.23

Since I over-estimated in a lot of spots tonight, I'm going to call this an 'under $5 meal'.  In case you were wondering, the remaining lasagna will be packaged in tupperware and frozen for a quick meal another day.

A good time was had by all, especially my youngest:

chicken romaine wraps with vegetable stew

So finger sandwiches are one of my daughter's favorite snacks.  In order to consider it a "meal", I added the stew, and made sure the wraps had protein and vegetable.  That, I feel, elevated this from "appetizers" to "dinner".  

There was some beef left over from last week's beef roast.  I had frozen it, and with this meal in mind I pulled it out last night.  Then, because I knew I needed some wheat tortillas to make the wraps, I went to the grocery store with the kids right after work.  

We found some crazy cheap chicken, coincidentally on sale; this pack was $3.34.  We also got this can of mixed veggies for 69 cents, this "romaine lettuce head" for 98 cents (yeah!) 2 lbs of onions for 88 cents (yeah!) and the tortillas for $2 (not so yeah...)  Salad dressing is $2 a bottle this week - not a fantastic price, but not bad.)

I put two pots of water on the stove.  In one, for the stew, I put 3 bullion cubes, about 2/3 of the beef, the can of veggies (which was almost ALL carrots, so I added these peas.  Then, because I couldn't leave well enough alone, I added onions (diced the smallest one out of the bag)  and corn.)



In the other pot, I put 2 of the 3 chicken breasts (third in the freezer) and set the timer so they could boil.  Then I diced the onion, mentioned above, and put half of it in the stew, saving the other half for the wraps.

To make the wraps, I put down a tortilla, some dressing, a single leaf (they were big), more dressing, and some meat, mixed with dressing and diced onions.

Then, I wrapped it up and sliced it into "snails",
turning them on their side and "displaying" them.  I made four wraps: One beef and honey mustard, one chicken and ranch, one chicken and thousand island, and one chicken and ranch with no onion, for my youngest.









Instead of putting each wrap on a plate for each one of us, because I knew that was too big of a serving for my kids, I put some of each wrap on a serving platter and had each kid pick 3 "snails" to go with their soup.  (It might not seem like much, but each full sized wrap made 6 snails, so 3 was half of a wrap, or a kids' serving).  Emily took four, "because they're delicious."

And she's right.

The soup was good but my oldest just does not photograph well.

Dessert was full-sized candy bars, purchased on sale (50 cents each) the day after Halloween and masterfully hidden for a full week, but eventually discovered when I pulled them out to get one for myself.

Our total for tonight is: 2/3 of $3.34 chicken, or $2.23.  4 leaves off a 98 cent head of lettuce, lets call it 10 cents, a few Tbsp of different salad dressings, which cost $2 a bottle, so 50 cents, max, 1 onion out of an 88 cent bag (of six) = 15 cents, 69 cent can veggies, a little bit of frozen peas/corn to fill out the stew, call it 50 cents max, 3 out of 25 boullion cubes, which cost $1.59 a container, or 19 cents, and 50 cent candy bars x family of 4 = $2 dessert, bringing our total to: $6.36

This is good mom! Bunnies LOVE carrots!

split chicken breasts and candied carrots

So in all fairness I didn't make this dish tonight.  As I said in Monday's post, I'm running out of recipes, and tonight for dinner I made us deep fried dinner.  This was one that I had made several weeks ago when my ex was in town, so I made enough for 5 that night.

First, I pulled out this crazy cheap chicken: 4 split breasts (translation: LOTS of white meat, a little bone and skin.  Made MORE than enough to feed us all.) for $5.03.  I thawed it in the microwave, and seasoned it.

Because I knew my ex would prefer bbq sauce to butter and seasonings, I did it in two separate dishes.

 I just poured 1/2 a bottle of BBQ on one, and sprayed the other with "butter flavored cooking spray" [generic Pam] and shook on "Italian Seasonings"




I then cooked it in the oven at 375 for an hour.  While it was cooking, I got out the rest of these carrots (roughly 65 cents worth) and washed, peeled, and sliced them, then put them in the pot.  Since dessert that night was store-bought cookies (on sale, the large, soft cookies were 8 for $1) I didn't need to do anything else, so I just relaxed for half an hour.  When there was 20 minutes left on the chicken, I turned the heat on the carrots: to make "candied" carrots, all you really need to add is a little bit of butter and a lot of sugar to the water that you boil the carrots in.


So, first, add just enough water to your pot to boil the carrots and turn the heat on high.  Once boiling, lower the heat to medium, add about 1 Tbsp butter or margarine (guess which one I use) and about a cup of sugar.  I add 3/4 cup brown sugar and 1/4 cup sugar (eyeballing and spooning, not actually measuring, folks), stir well, and set your timer for about ten minutes.  If you get a rolling boil on medium heat, lower it to medium-low.  It should be bubbling slowly, like a fetid swamp.   You can leave them simmering at this level indefinitely, as long as they don't dry out and burn to the pan.

 Although the kids were a little suspicious of carrots being passed off as "candied", they believed it when they tasted it.

Our totals for this meal, then, were:  $5.03 chicken, $1 for half a bottle of BBQ sauce, 65 cents for the carrots, and each cup of sugar was previously calculated at 25 cents.  Since this was for granulated sugar, not brown, let's call it 50 cents worth of "mixed sugars" to be on the safe side.  There was $1 for the pack of dessert cookies, and maybe 25 cents for the Pam and "Italian seasonings", bringing the total to 

$8.43  

And that fed an extra person.

The best part about this meal: The kids discovered that carrots can be yummy.

Chicken Wing Pizza

The theme tonight is orange and green for Halloween, right down to dessert.

I decided to make a chicken-wing pizza, one of my favorites, but I didn't start preparing dinner until after 4 pm, and it's not a particularly warm day, to allow the dough to rise, so I scoured the internet for a "quick" pizza dough recipe - I found one that uses baking powder instead of yeast, but the rest of the recipe was almost identical to my original recipe, aka, the one I didn't like very much.  But I thought I would give this one a try.  Short version: as pizza crust, yuk.  It came out like baking powder biscuits.  And really, really dry and flaky, as opposed to "spongy" or "springy".  So I'm not even posting it here for you.



To make a decent chicken wing pizza, (on a good crust) I start by cooking some chicken.  This partial pack (1/3? 2/5? less than half anyway) of chicken I boiled on the stove to cook it.

Then I mixed up my "wing sauce".  Now, this is best made by mixing blue cheese dressing and hot sauce, but  I didn't have any blue cheese in the house so I used ranch with bacon (mmmm bacon).  I use a 3 parts dressing 1 part hot sauce ratio, and it seems to work well.

I diced the cooked chicken and 1/2 an onion and topped the pizza: sauce, then cheese, then chicken and onion. Normally, I also finely dice some celery to top this but I didn't have any of that either.


Then, we started dessert: green pistachio instant pudding (2 cups milk and 1 pudding mix)  I mixed it the 2 minutes according to the directions, then let my youngest "help stir".
We poured it into dixie cups and put it in the fridge.  This mix made five pudding cups.  To offer a little variety, I mixed up a jello mix and put that in the fridge, too, but everyone wanted the pistachio anyway.


Lastly, we mixed up our side dish: broccoli and cheese.  Although this is normally made with cheddar, I found that yellow American is "smoother", and it's cheaper, and the kids can't really tell the difference anyway.  All I did was steam the broccoli in the microwave for 2 minutes, put on 3 pieces of cheese, cook for one additional minute, then stir, add another 3 pieces of cheese, and cook for one additional minute.  Voila!



Everything was done, so we served and ate.  Again, I'm going to tell you that the crust was not very tasty.  My oldest nibbled at his until it looked like the Millennium Falcon (or so he says) and my youngest ate all the toppings off of his and "accidentally" dropped his crust on the floor.

But he liked the broccoli.  
So that's a bonus.

And the pudding was delicious.










Totals for tonight: Pizza crust was no more than $1.  The most expensive ingredient was 17 cents, and there were only six ingredients and no, I'm really, really not giving you the recipe, even to verify the cost.  It was that bad.  The cheese on top was a $2 bag of mozzarella.  Unfortunately, I used all of the mozzarella from this crazy cheap cheese purchase.  The chicken we're going to call $1.40, since it was slightly less than half of a $3.05 pack.  The 1/2 an onion was 7 cents.  The pudding was 95 cents - 45 cents' worth of milk, and a 50 cent pudding mix.  The broccoli was about 1/3 of a $1.88 pack, so 63 cents, and six slices of american cheese, sold in a 16-pack for 99 cents, would be 37 cents.  So... $1 crust + $2 cheese  +  $1.40 chicken  + 7 cents onion + 95 cent pudding + 63 cents broccoli + 37 cents cheese =

$6.42

I think that next time I'm going to buy a boxed pizza crust mix and see how that turns out.

It can't be any worse.

Chicken drumsticks and potato chips

The theme for tonight is "finger foods"



These "chicken wings" are not actually wings; they're drumsticks from the Crazy Cheap Chicken purchased for $1.18/lb.  And they're huge.  This pack of 12 drumsticks was purchased for $4.24.  If you can't tell the size from this photo, 2 drumsticks would be an adult serving.

 

Before I even began to cook the wings, I made dessert: I've been saying that I couldn't find any more 99 cent brownie mixes; they're all $1.50 now.  But THIS was $1 a few weeks ago (I bought several). 

 

Unfortunately, this is a "snack size" mix, so even though the package says "makes 12" the batter was spread really thin.  Even after baking, it was only about 1/4 inch thick. To thicken it up, I had a little fun...

I made a peanut butter layer by mixing 1/4 cup peanut butter, 1/4 cup sugar, and one egg, and spreading it over the cooked brownies.  Then I put it back in the oven for about 5 minutes more.  (When the peanut butter layer cooked, its color lightened a little).  Then, I sprinkled most (probably 80%) of a bag of chocolate chips on top, and put it back in the oven to melt.

 

 

 

While the brownies were cooking the first time, I sliced three potatoes (out of 14 in a $1.99 bag) into thin strips and set them in a glass bowl to soak up some vinegar and salt (to make salt & vinegar chips, of course).  It didn't work -- they should be marinated in the fridge overnight for that -- they just came out tasting like regular homemade chips.

 

 

I turned on my deep fryer and put in the drumsticks, setting the timer for 15 minutes.  Drumsticks should be fried a minimum of 12 to make sure they are completely cooked.  Even when the timer went off, I thought they looked a little pale, so I did them for an extra 5 minutes to be safe.

 

Now, I had looked up a recipe for "asian hot wings" (kind of like a general tso's flavor, with honey, ginger, hot sauce, and a bunch of other stuff).  I didn't have 3 of the more exotic ingredients so I made several substitutions.  They didn't come out bad, but my storebought BBQ sauce was better and less time consuming, so I'm not going to repeat the recipe here.  Trust me, it wasn't worth the effort. 

 

I made 12 drumsticks in 3 flavors tonight: 4 in my homemade asian sauce, 4 in storebought BBQ, and 4 in a "spicy ranch" (3 parts ranch dressing to 1 part hot sauce).  Out of the 12 (very large) drumsticks, we ate 5: 2 for me, 1 for each kid.

 

The wings were a hit!

 

 

 

My daughter and I had the chips.  My boys didn't like them so much...

 

The face he made after tasting a chip.  Seriously.

 

Tonight's total: $1.77 worth of wings (5/12 of the pack which cost $4.24) + $1.50 worth of sauce (no real way of judging the cost of the homemade sauce but the more expensive between the ranch and the BBQ was the BBQ, and that was $2.  I only used 1/4 of the bottle on the 4 drumsticks, so if you figure I would have used 3/4 of a bottle on all 12, and that the BBQ was the most expensive, then I spent about $1.50 on sauce) The potatoes used to make the chips were 3/14 of a $1.99 bag, or 43 cents, and the vinegar and salt were probably another 10 or 20 cents.  Heck, let's call it a quarter.  The brownie mix was $1, the peanut butter, egg, and sugar probably 50 cents, and the chocolate chips were $2 a bag, and I used an estimated 80%, or $1.60's worth.  There were 12 brownies, of which we ate 6 when all was said and done, so that's half of $3.10, or $1.55, making tonight's total: $1.77 wings + $1.50 sauce + 68 cents chips + $1.55 brownies = $5.50

Crazy cheap AND delicious!  This calls for another brownie!