Who doesn’t love a $4.99 Costco Rotisserie Chicken?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into Costco for the sole purpose of getting dinner via a rotisserie chicken and strawberries or a salad.
But, often so much ends up going in the trash. Here’s a few little things to use up as much of that bird as possible!!
First, eat dinner! When I was single, I could get up to 4 dinners out of a chicken. Now that I’m married, we usually can get a good dinner and plenty left over for a lunch or two. The dogs end up getting some chicken too.
Second, pick the rest of the meat off the bones. In our house the breast meat is preferred over thigh and leg meat. That meat is great for soups or casseroles later on. It gets picked off and either frozen or freeze dried (affiliate link).
Lastly, throw that carcass in a crockpot with some onions, carrots, celery, salt, pepper, sage and whatever other spices you want and turn on low for 36+ hours and make bone broth. Homemade bone broth is so delicious and VERY nutritious. Once you let the broth cool in the fridge and skim off any fat, if it looks like Jello, congratulations, you have all the goodness out of those bones!
To keep your bone broth for later use, you can either can it (pressure can it), freeze it or freeze dry it. (I freeze mine in a silicone muffin pan which makes it easy to pop out and then its easy to estimate how much each ‘puck’ measures)
Once you’ve literally taken all of the good stuff off this bird, what is left can now be thrown in the trash (or yard waste if your town does that). (Don’t throw that in your backyard compost unless you have a very hot compost bin, meat and dairy will attract 4-legged pests I wouldn’t want to have to deal with)
Happy Chicken eating!