It's official. My 20 year old daughter just moved out on her own - all the way from the Pacific Northwest to New York City. She's never lived on her own before though she did spend a month living in Portland with a brother of mine and supported herself, managed her own groceries, cooking and transportation, all the while earning a living with her free-lance modeling jobs she scheduled on her own. She's never even visited the city prior to today.
In her first foray to the city to find food (grocery store only as she is fiscally responsible to a fault) - she realized quickly there were many differences in the selection, prices, locations and types of grocery stores. The nearest "supermarket" like Safeway, is over 70 miles and she's reliant upon the public transportation system so - that kind of trip isn't practical.
I realized in a panic - I had so much more to impart!! There is a huge difference in teaching someone how to cook with food you've purchased with your two family middle class income house vs. teaching a budding young career woman how to SURVIVE on a tiny budget and still be able to eat healthy meals - in a HUGE city with prices twice what we are accustomed to in the Northwest.
I did some quick searches on Google Maps to see what stores were actually in the Bronx are where she is renting a room - viewed the street view to get a sense of the places, viewed the store websites and "sale prices" in order to try to give her a crash course (via email) in her most economical choices based on my 21 years of experience from broke to making a decent living.
I found a store that advertized whole chickens on sale for $1.99 a pound. Mind you, whole chicken on sale in Washington state is .89 to .99 cents a pound...but everything I saw on "sale" in NYC looked to be nearly twice the price of what we are used to here - so I went with a whole chicken as her best bet to survive her first week.
She consistently eats old fashioned oat meal with some fruit for breakfast. So, lunch and dinner were my primary focus. She's aiming for $25-$30 a week.
What follows us my mom crash course in "how to make a whole chicken last a week with limited cooking tools, experience, seasonings, money to spend, and still eat a healthy variety of dinners/lunch leftovers".
I think your cheapest option for meat will really be whole
chickens. Looks like that store Key Food has whole fryers for 1.99 a
pound. That means probably $8-10 for a decent sized chicken. There are
lots of recipes you can make with this even though it's not "easy" like
cut up chicken - it's really going to give you the best "meat" value.
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Dear Daughter,
A few very easy things you can do with a whole chicken that aren't too "gross". Boneless, skinless anything chicken is going to cost triple or more and lacks so much of the flavor. In my opinion, chicken can be both tasty, affordable and healthy.
1. You gotta take those "gizzards" out of the inside cavity and throw those away first no matter what you do with it. Yes, it's gross. I have no idea why the chicken places still keep putting them in there. Some people make fried "gizzards" or gravy with this stuff, but I've never done anything but throw these things out. I don't even want to know what they are...mushy and gross. Don't look. Just scoop, and throw away. Rinse out the inner cavity with water and drain the water out by turning the chicken upside down over the sink or on a plate.
2. You could learn how to chop one up by finding a video online I'm
sure, but you'll need a nice sharp meat knife to do it. If your roommate has
one, you may want to try that. If you chop it up, you can freeze to bake, fry or boil
later (you'll need zip lock bags or reusable "storage" type containers -
those will cost more up front, but you can use them again and again).
To freeze them, don't buy the generic bags...if they break it'll be
icky. Squeeze as much air out as possible and mark it with the contents
and the date you freeze it. Since you are just one person, you could
probably freeze like this for baking or frying later:
- 1 breast
- 1 breast
- 1 thigh, leg and wing
- 1
thigh, leg and wing
That means really dinner meat for 4 different meals
and maybe enough on each of the breasts that you'd have left overs the next
day for lunch depending on how you cook it.
3. An easy way to get all the meat off it and use it
(or freeze it) as cooked meat is just place an unfrozen whole chicken
into a very large pot. Place enough water in to cover all the meat. The
very simple version is to just lightly salt the water and boil it at a
medium high heat for an hour or so till you can see the skin is starting
to pull away from the meat. Keep an eye on the water. If it gets too
low, add a little more till you know the whole chicken is still covered
with water. Remove the chicken from the water (carefully cause it's
hot!) and put it in a bowl to cool down enough that you don't burn your
fingers when you pull the meat off. Once it's cooled, you'll just pull
all the meat off the bones - you'll discard the skin and bones and just
keep the chunks of meat. At that point you have cooked chicken meat
that's suitable for a lot of different meals.
You can get more creative with the left over water from boiling the
chicken and make your own chicken stock, but you'll probably want to
keep it simple at this point.
4. With all that boiled chicken meat, you can separate into 1-2 person sized servings and freeze it for future use.
5. Some ideas on what to do with the meat - add it to a nice simple
green salad, add it to a simple pasta dish either lightly seasoned with
something easy like salt and pepper or served with a spaghetti sauce or
white sauce like Alfredo. You could chop some up and mix it with some
mayo and mustard and have an easy chicken sandwich meat filling. You
could simply saute some chopped onion in butter or veggie oil and add
some bell pepper or whatever veggies are on sale (think thinly sliced
carrots, celery, other root veggies like turnip or parsnips, broccoli).
Simple ways to have nice flavor without a lot of expensive seasonings
are salt, pepper, red pepper flakes. You then would have a
nice protein/veggie meal with a lot of natural flavor.
So for the boiling method you'd need:
- One large pot for boiling
- One
whole chicken (anything under $1.50 a pound is usually a great deal,
though I saw chicken for $1.99 a pound on sale at the store near you
which isn't bad either)
- One bowl to let it cool
- A bowl to place the meat as you pull it off the chicken
- Salt
(iodized table salt is inexpensive, but not as nice as cooking with
"Kosher" salt or Sea Salt if you can afford it or can find a good sale)
- Storage containers for the extra meat (cooked meat will keep longer
than raw meat in the fridge so if you were going to eat it all week you
could just keep it in the fridge. If you don't think you'll eat it all
in one week, then freeze it)
- A black marker to write the date on the freezer bag (if you use a
reusable storage container, you'll need freezer tape to stick on the lid
to write the date on it and you'll probably want to wrap it in plastic
wrap if there is a lot of "air space" in the container. Freezer burn
will set in and make your frozen meat taste icky if you don't keep the
air away).
Then you'll just need to decide what meals you'll want to make with it and add to your ingredients accordingly.
For example:
A
small box of any kind of pasta (really any kind will work, just the
shapes add texture and hold on to "sauces" differently). Buy what's on
sale and you like! Over here you can find pasta on sale for about a
dollar a box or like a 12 oz package of noodles, but it'll probably be
more over there.
Pepper (ground pepper is the least expensive, but look at the signs
to find the best value - you can add a lot to a meal with pepper for
flavor, red pepper flakes (a little goes a long way), onions (Yellow
onions are less expensive usually, but they have more onion flavor and
aren't as soft and sweet when cooked like the sweet onion varieties),
veggies on sale, spaghetti sauce on sale (usually the cheap stuff in a
can instead of a jar doesn't taste as wonderful, but you can improve the
flavor with some chopped garlic lightly sauteed with butter or veggie
oil) on low heat and/or a sauteed onion added to it), bread, mayo and
mustard, salad greens.
Without knowing the exact prices - I think this
would cost you about $25 depending mostly on the veggies. The salt,
pepper, and other seasonings you buy - will last you for more than a
week of course. If you did something like this each week, plus stick
with water, oatmeal with sugar for breakfast you'd have healthy meals
with a nice variety (other than the fact it's all chicken) for 7 days
easily. It's a nice balance of carb, protein, fiber and healthy veggies.
From what I see on the prices in NYC - I think you'll probably end up needing to stay away
from fruit as much - because even the sale prices looked pretty high
(double what they are here) but the veggies on sale were comparable.
Potatoes are cheap and filling and you can add them to a lot of
different meals (mashed, roasted, etc.)
If eggs are a good price, that's a nice easy source
of protein - you can easily add that to a salad or make an
egg sandwich and they last a long time.
If you want to chop it up (vs. boiling) and save it that way -
just lightly season the chicken skin when you want to cook it (salt,
pepper is fine or you can do something like sage or even once I did a
taco seasoning mix on the whole thing) then just bake it in a glass or
stone type baking dish on 350 for about 25-35 mins till the juice is
clear when you poke it or about 165 on a meat thermometer (if your roommate has one since I know you don't).
