Really Cheap Chicken Soup

It may be hard to believe, but even I get lucky once in a while.

I went to my local groceria to order a slab of pork belly and they always have a frozen bunker of marked down meat. The meat at this store is usually higher price than most of the chain stores (but also a higher quality), so the items in the bunker aren’t often much of a savings.

But I found two packages of chicken necks (Yeah, not many people get too excited finding chicken necks) marked at 8 cents a pound !!!! WOOOOOOO !!!

24 cents !!!!!!

I think at the time that I was making this batch of soup, it was particularly warm, and as a favor to the rest of the family, I cooked it outside on my gas grill to keep from adding extra heat to the inside of the house.

You caught me, I added vegetables.

Non meat ingredients.

Veggies going in for a hot bath

Now, if you didn’t already know, would you recognize these as chicken necks?

Barnsnargle

That’s a fair amount of meat that came off the necks.

Now, I was in a bit of a hurry to finish making this batch of soup and what I should have done was wait until the necks cooled down. As it was, they were still pretty hot and I wasn’t able to clean the meat off any better.

Big pile of bones !!

This ended up making a very good batch of soup that was my lunch for a week.

Rib Eye Steak

Aug31

Oh lucky me !!!

The grocery store had Rib Eye steak on sale for $5.99 lb (that’s my price point) and the wife brought home a couple of nice ones.

“Steaks For Grilling”

Well DUH !!!!

And despite my best judgement, there will a non potato vegetable with dinner.

Pre cut in a bag. Really simple.

Onto the fire………….

Mmmmm, Meat !!!

Perfectly cooked to rare/medium rare !!!

The veggies turned out OK.

OK, for you real carnivores out there, you know what this is……………

MEAT CANDY !!!!

Best meat on the cow !!

I used to talk to a coworker about food quite a bit and he always bought his meat without bones. He thought is was a waste of money to pay for the bone-in steak or pork chops. I told he that he needed to try it at least once.

Well, he came to work a few days later and had cooked a couple of bone in pork chops and he was raving for days about how much better the chops tasted with the bone in. Another convert !!!

Well, instead of gnawing on these, I thought that I would make some “Beef Barley Mushroom Soup.”

Boil them up for a beat.

Barley.

Barley is a close second to my split pea for soup making.

Yep. those are the mushrooms.

Toss in a few carrots and pick the meat off the bone.

Viola !!

A few days of lunches for work.

Chicken Masala Surprise

May30

I had some rice, chicken and a bottle of masala and thought that I would cook up some “Chicken Masala Surprise.”

So here we have the whole chicken, ready to be parted out.

Just a couple of minutes later, chicken parts.

All of the left over bits. Normally I would cook the wings with the rest of the chicken but this time I thought that I would use them in making some chicken soup.

So we are going to take a little break from the Masala while I make my chicken soup.

All the leftover chicken bits go into the part for cooking

Today’s safety tip:

As some one that has had two bouts of food poisoning (one confirmed one from CHICKEN), I am actually not too concerned about getting sick again but since I am responsible for a nine year old, I will clean all of the kitchen utensils with hot soapy water.