The Great American Food Stores in the Binghamton/Norwich NY area have boneless skinless chicken breasts in the 3lb or larger pkgs for $1.69 a LB!!! Usually the sale price around here (which comes up about once every month to month and a half) at all the major grocery chains runs about $1.89. So this is a great deal. Guess who is going to buy a ton of chicken breasts!!
I’ll probably buy them and pkg them up several ways.
One of my favorite OAMC (once a month cooking-also known as freezer cooking) techniques is to freeze items in marinade. You just put the meat in a freezer ziplock bag along with the marinade and stick it straight in the freezer. The liquid around the meat keeps the air from touching it, hence avoiding freezer burn. When you pull the meat out to defrost at a later date it marinates as it defrosts. I love this tip in the summer, because you can just pull something out in the morning and have it ready to grill by dinner time. I’ll pkg mine up in meal sized portions, some with italian dressing as a marinade, and some with teriaki or chinese BBQ (I’ve got the recipe upstairs-if anyone is interested I can post it later). This technique is sometimes referred to as “dump” chicken, cause you just dump it all in a baggie together. Soopermom’s chicken dump pages have a bunch of chicken dump recipes.
I’ll take some of the other chicken breasts and make chicken cordon bleu. This is a bit more of a pain, as you have to pound the chicken breasts out with a meat mallet. But it makes such an elegant meal. I just pound them out and then put cheese and ham on the inside (I use the soft “laughing cow” cheese 1/2 of a wedge per chicken or else sliced swiss and thin sliced lunch meat ham) roll them up and secure with toothpicks. You want to try to sort of cover all the edges when you roll it up so the filling doesn’t all leak out when you cook it. You can freeze them raw or cook and then freeze. Or you can just take the pounded out meat and bread them and then freeze them (cooked or uncooked). Then you can use it for chicken piccata or chicken parmesean later.
I’ll probably also take some of the chicken and slice it up to make my own chicken fingers. These I will cook and then flash freeze on a tray before placing in a zipper freezer bag. That way when we need a quick lunch/dinner for the kids we can just pull a few out and nuke them.
I usually don’t use chicken breast meat for stirfries etc-I buy the chicken thighs at around $.79 a Lb, then boil them and pick the meat off the bones (freezing the broth of course-usually in 2c portions.) Then I use this meat in stirfries etc. Maybe a little less flavorful than chicken breast sliced up and marinated etc, but a heck of a lot cheaper per portion!
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