Now that I am middle-aged and financially pinched, I am rediscovering things I used to do when I was young and financially pinched.  I used to manage a household on a teensy shoestring budget, and still paid off my student loans and saved up $10K for a down payment on the condo I bought when I was 23.  I know that I give the impression of being a cashmere-wearing, wine-guzzling, artisan-salt-sprinkling spendthrift, but really, I’m quite capable of parsimoniousness; I just prefer not to exercise that capacity if I don’t have to.

But now I have to again, and so, once a week, I am returning to a ritual which I think of as Getting the Most Out of a Chicken.  I wouldn’t be getting quite as much out of the chicken if I were feeding more than one person, of course, but as it is, I can coax eight meals out of one bird plus a handful of assorted vegetables, so I’d say the total cost of the project is $20.  The trick is to start with a really good chicken; I’ll spend up to $15 for a nice fat free-range bird, because the quality of the entire experience starts with the bird.

The first thing I do is brine the chicken overnight.  If you’ve never done this to a chicken, you are missing out on the best bird you’ll ever eat.  It’s very simple — just soak the bird for 24 hours in salt water, with whatever else you might like for flavoring thrown in there … lately I’ve been using a third of a cup of lemon juice, a bay leaf, and a handful of coarsely chopped garlic.  The salt water makes the chicken unbelievably flavorful, and also keeps the breast meat from drying out during cooking … it doesn’t dilute the taste of the meat, and I don’t know what the chemical principle is behind the whole thing, but trust me, it really works.  I usually cover the bird with foil for the first hour of cooking, to really make sure the breast doesn’t dry out, but it’s probably unnecessary with the brining.

While the chicken is roasting, I get my giant 12-quart stockpot ready, with several stalks of celery, a couple of carrots, half a bulb of garlic, an onion, a couple of bay leaves, a handful of kosher salt, a handful of peppercorns, and some rosemary.  I will never buy rosemary again as long as I live; every other person in my neighborhood has a rosemary plant of “feed me, Seymour” proportions in their yards, so I just break off a branch when I’m out for my morning walk, wash it, and save myself the unnecessary cost of buying herbs. 

A good happy free-range chicken, when it roasts, will produce an unbelievable amount of rich fatty juice that can be made into gravy, but that would be a waste, in my opinion.  After the bird is done, I pour that juice into the stockpot to add extra flavor to the broth I’m going to make.  I strip the meat off the chicken, but I don’t get too fanatical about it, because I want some of that meat in the broth.  Once the chicken is largely naked, it gets popped into the pot, covered with water, and set to simmer for however long I feel like leaving it.  Usually I leave it for at least 3 hours, until the carcass really breaks down. 

Then I have the fun of straining all the crap out of the broth, and picking through the pile of dessicated vegetables, rubbery cartilage, and broken bones to get all the extra meat out to put back into the strained broth.  Depending on my mood, this either feels like a treasure hunt, or like the most disgusting task on the face of the earth.  I put all that salvaged meat into a little container for later, and put the strained broth into the refrigerator.  Then, the next morning, I can skim off the layer of fat that has floated to the top of the broth and congealed, so I have all the flavor from those evil gravy juices in the soup, but the evil part gets skimmed off and discarded.

Then I get out my little plastic freezer containers, and distribute the salvaged meat evenly among them; usually a chicken will easily yield 15-20 cups of broth.  I freeze the broth, and then thaw it out during the week to make whatever kind of soup I feel like.  The original chicken usually lasts for three meals, and then I have at least five or six more meals’ worth of broth in the freezer.  I therefore feel as though I am being frugal and admirable. 

So feel free to admire me.  Thank you.