Cheap and Cheerful: I Quit Sugar and Waste

Facebook keeps reminding me that I have't on my page for quite some time. So I thought I would share this with you, and my Facebook page, then that should keep Facebook happy for awhile. I've been a bit too busy lately to keep my blog up to date.
I've made a few changes in my life. I've started regular exercise and changed what I eat. I have borrowed a heap of Leslie Sansone Walk at home dvd's from the library, and am an I Quit Sugar (Sarah Wilson) convert. Consequently in the last 3 or 4 months I have lost 6 kgs, a total of 8kg over the last 12 months.
I recently bought Sarah Wilson's Simplicious cook book and love it so much it lives permanently on my kitchen bench, never making it to the shelf where the other cook books are kept. She has a fantastic website, the link to her website I Quit Sugar is under my Recommended Blogs. Scroll down the page and you'll see it on the left hand side. In the book is a recipe for Chicken Pot Au Feu. I made this the other night and the shredded chicken from it was delicious. One of the things I love about her cook book is her suggestions on what you can use the leftovers for. After making this chicken dish, here are the things I have made with the leftovers.
Four Ingredient Green Chook shred up Abundance Bowl - from the recipe book.
I discovered the stock/liquid makes a lovely thin soup or chicken stock. Freeze the excess in the ice cube tray for later use in other dishes.
I blended the left over vegies and made the following two dishes. Both have been big hits with my children, who usually veer away from vegies. There are no measurements (sorry), I just keep adding ingredients until the mix looked right.
"Yorkshire" style pudding:
Blended vegies, two eggs, gluten free self raising flour. Pre-heat oven to 200C/400F and place a little oil in the bottom of each cup in a muffin tray. If using a silicone muffin tray, omit oil. Mix all ingredients together until a thin batter has formed. Pour into muffin tray until 2/3 full. Place in oven and cook about 15mins.
Vegie muffins: Blended vegies, 1 egg, self raising flour (gluten free or normal), grated cheddar cheese. Preheat oven to 180C/350F. Beat all ingredients together until you have a cake mixture consistency. Pour into muffin tray. Cook until golden brown on top (approx 15-20 mins).

I've now used up all the chicken meat and vegies, but still have some of the stock left. This has been a very economical way to get so many dishes out of one meal. Thank you Sarah Wilson and the I Quit Sugar team! And to top it off, I used the offcuts from the vegies to make Sarah's vegie stock in my slow cooker. Nothing was wasted! Once I had finished with the vegie scraps after making the stock, they went into my compost heap. The only thing to make it to the bin was the plastic the chicken (free range) was wrapped in.

Saving money with chicken

I saw a link to this video on Facebook yesterday. After watching it, I went food shopping and bought a price-reduced free-range chook ($11.60) and followed the instructions on this video. From one chook I made 6 cups of chicken stock, 2 large chicken breasts, 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs and 2 wings. Apart from the savings dollar wise, I'm also happy with the reduction in packaging that I would have had to throw away if I had bought these products separately. No stock packaging, no meat trays wrapped in plastic for the chicken portions, just one lot of plastic packaging that was wrapped around the chook to have to deal with.
So if you're looking to save money and packaging for chicken portions and stock, and don't mind spending a few minutes cutting them up yourself, give this a go. I chucked the backbone and any other bones and skin that I removed in my slow cooker with a carrot and onion and some parsley, with enough water to cover the carcass, for 4 hours on high. Put it in the fridge to cook and then skim the fat off before putting into containers to freeze.
Also, I put the chicken portions into reusable freezer safe containers and labelled them.
http://www.nytimes.com/video/dining/100000002155362/cutting-up-a-whole-chicken.html

Chicken, mushroom and asparagus cream pasta bake (with cost breakdown)

I made this for dinner last night and worked out how much each ingredient cost to get a total cost as well as a cost per serve. At just over $3 per serve, you can afford to eat the best free-range chicken!
Ingredients:
375g pasta - I used large vegie spirals but you could also use something like rigatoni - $1.69
60g butter - $50c
600g chicken breast fillets, diced into 1cm pieces. I used free range chicken - $9.61 (My husband said it had too much chicken in it, so you could use about half the chicken)
100g button mushrooms, sliced thinly - $1.00
2 tablespoons plain flour - 5c
2 cups milk - 55c
1/2 cup coarsly grated romano cheese - $1.24 - you could use parmesan
1 1/4 cup coarsly grated cheddar cheese - $2.20 (I found it a bit too cheesy for my liking, so will be using half the amount of cheese the next time)
170g (1 bunch) asparagus, trimmed, chopped coarsly - $2 (I used fresh asparagus and microwaved it a bit, but you could used tinned asparagus)
1/4 cup parsley, optional - free from my garden

Total cost - $18.84
Serves 6, so cost per serve is $3.14

1. Preheat oven to 200 degrees celsius (180 fan forced). My oven is in farhenheit, so I put it on 400 degrees F.
2. Cook pasta in a large saucepan of boiling water until tender. Drain.
3. Meanwhile, heat a third of the butter in a large frying pan. Cook chicken in batches until brown and cooked through.
4. Heat remaining butter in same pan, cook mushrooms, stirring, until tender. Add flour, cook, stirring 1 minute. Gradually add milk, stirring over medium heat until mixture boils and thickens. Stir in chicken, 1/4 cup of romano and 3/4 cup cheddar and the asparagus.
5. Combine chicken mixture and drained pasta in a 2.5 litre (10 cup) capacity ovenproof dish, sprinkle with remaining cheeses. Cook, uncovered, in oven, about 15 minutes or until top is browned lightly. Sprinkle with parsley to serve.
(Recipe adapted from Australian Women's Weekly Chicken Favourites)

For those of you with children, my two year old loved it, except for the asparagus.
As I mentioned above, I found it to be too cheesy. If you halved the cheese, you could probably make this for less than $3 per serve. Non free-range chicken is also half the price of free-range chicken, but doens't taste as good.