Chicken Chicken and More Chicken

Guess what was on sale for $1.28 a pound at my grocery store this weekend? Breast meat, mostly skinless and definitely boneless. I got enough to keep me busy almost all afternoon with a modified prep day. Today, I didn't make any Multiply Meal casseroles or any muffins. I just concentrated on the chicken. Well, mostly, I did have a large package of hamburger meat that needed to be divided up too. Man cannot live on chicken alone, I always tell my husband.

Here is what I got accomplished:

1. One crockpot full of Green Chili Chicken. This pretty much my Triple Play Meal for the week. It will make soup, soft tacos or taco salad and omelets.

2. One batch of baked Italian style chicken meatballs. I ground the chicken myself. Some of the balls went into tonight's dinner of Italian tomato soup. Yum.

4. Freezer Favorites of sliced chicken, coated with hickory rub or Yucatan Spice mix. Those are packaged ready to thaw and cook in meal size portions. Laid out thinly in the ziploc bags, these can go directly onto the George grill without thawing if need be.

5. Two dinners worth of Salsa Dancing Chicken. Always a favorite.

6. More Freezer Favorites of whole breasts, pounded and dredged in spice rubs. These could be roasted in the oven or grilled.

7. Several Freezer Favorite packages of smoky flavored ground chicken. These also use the spread it out thin in a freezer bag technique for quick thawing and cooking. Ground chicken is good to use in soup and stirfry. It cooks up so quickly I don't need to precook it to make a really fast meal. It is done by the time the veggies are.

I think that is it for the bird. I also made Mexican Minute Beef and some small packets of raw ground beef spread thinly in my sandwich bags.

If you want to pack some fresh ground meat for easy storage in the freezer, try this trick I learned at Lunch in a Box. Pack your uncooked ground meat in a large freezer bag. Seal the bag and spread the meat out to all edges. Use a chopstick to score the meat into individual servings. The bag can then even be folded on itself for freezer storage, and it makes it possible to remove only one portion at a time, and not have to worry about thawing the entire bag. Frugal, yes? This is definitely one of the things you do if you buy the big roll of ground beef. Not all my strategies involve cooking the food before freezing. These are time savers even straight from the freezer!

Gee, I think I need to get a kickback for selling all the Ziploc bags!