Sliced & Diced: Chicken

We all knew this one was coming didn’t we? Have we ever done a Once A Month Meals menu without chicken on it? I don’t think so! Chicken is a major staple in our diets, so you should be seeing it on menus for a long time to come. Over the last year I have always had people commenting that when they were cooking chicken, they had too much chicken or not quite enough. Usually, it is too much. That isn’t such a bad thing, you can always just freeze the extra for use at another time. However, consistency is important to me, so I thought it would be great to do research of my own. Here is what I came up with:

As you can see, depending on what you use as your starting point for cooked chicken, you get different results. (See the recent post on making your own rotisserie chicken). For this reason, I have decided that when I write menus that I will list the pounds of chicken needed rather than the number of breasts needed. If an original recipe only lists numbers of breasts, I will make the conversions as I feel necessary so that we are only dealing with pounds, instead of quantity. I think that this will make for a more consistent menu. And you don’t have to worry as much about the weight of your chicken. Keep in mind that we will be using these size references from now on for Once A Month Mom menus.  And as we started last week with Cilantro, now is your opportunity to share your favorite recipes that include chicken. Here are a few of my favorites from this site:

• Garlic & Herb Chicken
• Jody’s Chicken & Noodles
• Buffalo Chicken Wraps
• Paleo Pineapple Salsa Chicken Bake
• Easy Chicken Pot Pie
• Chicken Divan
• Chicken Alfredo Casserole with Buttermilk Biscuits
• Lighter White Chicken Chile
• GFDF Honey Bourbon Chicken in the Slow Cooker