Bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs are the best deal in the grocery store and I will stand by this forever. At Food Lion last Monday they were $1.89 a pound. I bought a three-pound pack — eight thighs — for $5.67. Those eight thighs fed my household of three for four dinners and two lunches over the course of the week, and then the bones made stock that's sitting in my freezer right now waiting to become next week's soup.
I'm going to walk through exactly how, because I think most people look at a pack of chicken thighs and see one meal. I see three days.
Monday: Roasted (4 thighs)
Four thighs on a sheet pan, skin side up. Salt, pepper, garlic powder — nothing you'd have to buy special. Around them I put whatever needed to get cooked before it went bad: half a head of broccoli that was yellowing at the edges (still fine, just urgent), four carrots cut into chunks, and an onion quartered. Everything tossed in a couple tablespoons of oil.
Four hundred degrees, forty minutes, don't touch it. The skin renders its own fat and crisps up, and that fat drips down onto the vegetables and roasts them in it. By the end the broccoli tips are almost black and the carrots are soft and caramelized. My son Marcus ate two thighs. My mother and I split the other two with most of the vegetables.
The cost of this dinner was roughly the chicken ($2.84 for four thighs), plus maybe a dollar in vegetables that were about to turn anyway, plus oil and seasoning. Call it $4 for three people.
The sheet pan is important. One pan means one thing to wash, and it means the chicken and vegetables cook in each other's company. If you roast chicken thighs on a rack by themselves, the fat drips into the pan and you have to pour it off. If you put vegetables under them, the fat is doing useful work. I don't know why you'd waste it.
Monday night: The bones go into the bag
After dinner I pulled the meat off the two carcass halves Marcus had left and put it in a container in the fridge — about a cup of shredded chicken. The bones, skin, and cartilage went into a gallon freezer bag that lives in my freezer permanently. Every time I have chicken bones, shrimp shells, onion ends, celery leaves, or carrot peels, they go in the bag. When the bag is full, it becomes stock. This costs nothing and takes no active time. You're saving trash.
Tuesday: Chicken salad (leftover shredded meat + 2 thighs)
I took the shredded leftover chicken and cold-roasted two more thighs specifically for this. Cold-roasting just means I put them in the oven in the morning while I was making coffee, same method as Monday. By the time they cooled and I shredded them, I had about two cups of chicken total.
Chicken salad: shredded chicken, two tablespoons of mayo, a stalk of celery diced small, salt, pepper, a squeeze of lemon if you have one. That's it. I have seen recipes for chicken salad with grapes and walnuts and dried cranberries and I'm sure they're lovely but grapes are $4 a pound and this is Tuesday lunch.
This made enough for three sandwiches on Tuesday and two more on Wednesday. Marcus took his to school in a baggie with crackers instead of bread because he's sixteen and has opinions.
Wednesday: Barbecue chicken (last 2 thighs)
The last two thighs. I could have roasted them again but we'd had roasted chicken twice already and even Marcus would notice. So I put them in a small baking dish, poured about half a cup of barbecue sauce over them — I keep a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's because it's $2 and it's fine — and baked them covered at 350°F for forty minutes, then uncovered for ten to let the sauce get tacky.
Barbecue chicken thighs with rice. The rice cooker does its job for about forty cents' worth of rice. I made a quick carrot-raisin slaw on the side because I had carrots left from Monday's bag and a box of raisins in the pantry. The slaw sounds like something a cafeteria would serve and I mean that as a compliment — it's crunchy, a little sweet, and it cuts through the sticky barbecue sauce exactly right.
Total dinner cost: about $1.42 for the chicken, $0.40 for rice, $0.30 for the sauce, maybe $0.50 for the slaw. That's a $2.62 dinner for three people and nobody would have guessed it.
Thursday: Stock day
The freezer bag was full. I dumped it into my biggest pot — chicken bones from this week and last, an onion end, carrot peels, a few garlic cloves that had started to sprout, some parsley stems I'd saved — covered it with water, and simmered it for about three hours with the lid cracked while I did other things.
Strained it through a colander. Got about ten cups of stock that was golden and slightly gelatinous when it cooled, which means there was enough collagen from the bones and cartilage to give it body. This is stock you cannot buy. The boxed stuff is fine, I use it when I'm out, but it's thin and salty compared to this. This tastes like someone's kitchen.
Six cups of that stock became Kae's potato soup for Thursday dinner — potatoes, onion, the stock, a splash of milk, salt and pepper. I put shredded cheese on top because we had it and because potato soup without cheese is just potato water with ambitions. Marcus had two bowls.
The remaining four cups went into quart containers in the freezer. That's two future soups, already started, for free.
The Final Count
Eight chicken thighs, $5.67:
- Monday dinner (roasted, 4 thighs + vegetables): fed 3
- Tuesday/Wednesday lunch (chicken salad, 2 thighs + leftovers): fed 3 twice
- Wednesday dinner (barbecue, 2 thighs + rice): fed 3
- Thursday dinner (potato soup from bone stock): fed 3
- Freezer stock for two future meals: fed nobody yet but they will
Six meals. Fourteen servings. Forty cents per serving for the chicken alone, and most of the meals came in under a dollar a plate when you add the sides.
I'm not doing this to prove a point. This is just how I cook. It's how my mother cooked and probably how her mother cooked — you buy the cheap cut with the bones, you use all of it, and the last thing it gives you is the stock. There's nothing clever about it. It's just not wasting things.
