My family and friends like to jokingly call me Martha. In some ways, I feel that I should have been born in 1930 and often refer to myself as a Grandma. This is all because I have been increasingly making more things from scratch and finding new ways to make money stretch a little further.
I'm hoping this will help inspire some of you to start your own spendthrift journey or maybe just give you some ideas that you may not have thought of already.
If you haven't already got one, get yourself a chest freezer - I bought one a little while ago and it gets used a lot!
The first thing I did when I got my chest freezer was snap up a bargain on whole chickens at Woolworths. They had been on special for $2.99 a kilo but were almost at the best before date so had been marked down to $1.50 a kilo! As they were going straight into the freezer that day and would be eaten the same day they were defrosted, there is absolutely no harm in buying reduced meat. So I bought 21 whole chickens!
My next thought was "Now what the heck am I going to do with them".
With a little help from Gordon Ramsay courtesy of Youtube (Click here to link to the clip), I figured out how to break the chickens down into breasts, thighs, drumsticks and wings and I froze them in meal sized portions.
I didn't stop there though.
I also froze the chicken carcasses and started keeping and freezing the offcuts and peelings of carrots, celery, broccoli etc. Once I had a fair supply of offcuts, I made chicken stock! I managed to make litres and litres of stock (normally pay around $3 a litre) using stuff I would have ordinarily thrown away!
The overall process was not that difficult and I don't think there is any other way that I could have bought chicken breast for $3 a kilo, much less for $1.50 a kilo! And even at the normal full price of around $5 or $6 a kilo, it's still so much cheaper than buying separated chicken pieces.
I don't think I will ever buy already portioned chicken again!
What's even better is that having all the different cuts of chicken in the freezer has encouraged me to be more adventurous and find new ways to use it in meals.
