To help make those recipes a lot less work at the time, I cook my chicken ahead of time and freeze it. I buy the family pack size of half chicken breasts and cook in a pot of water.
It takes about an hour, hour and a half to cook a pack of chicken, sometimes a little longer depending on the size of the chicken breast. Once cooked, removed from the pot to a plate to cool.
Once cooled off, you can either put the chicken into the refrigerator to bone at a later time, or bone then. The chicken really is easiest to bone when the chicken is still warm. Either way, the next step is to cut the chicken into small pieces. And then I measure the chicken out into 2 cup portions and then place into a quart size Ziploc freezer bag, remembering to label the bag and date it. Making sure all the air is pushed out of the bag, zipping it shut, and then placing into the freezer.
Now the chicken is ready to pull out, defrost, and use for whenever I have a dish on the menu that calls for cooked chicken. It's been a tremendous time saver!**Sometimes these family pack of chicken breasts can be found on sale for .99 cents a pound at Stater Bros., making the packaged about $5-$6. I usually wait until they are on sale and then buy two or three at a time. One family pack, depending on the size of the chicken breasts, will yield about 4-5 bags of 2 cups of chicken.
1 comment:
I do this too, except I usually bake them instead because I like the flavor better. It's so nice to have that cooked and diced chicken all ready to go!
(I finally got all my RSS feeds back up and running after months of rebuilding my computer, so hopefully I can keep up with your blogs again. :D)
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