First the avocado toast, now the rotisserie chicken... When we will we learn?
Lazy enragement headline writing. This is exactly the type of headline that for me makes we want to read the main article NOT AT ALL.
Here's why - Costco sells rotisserie chickens as a loss leader. They're $5 which is substantially less than the cost of the chicken itself, however, with some care and planning that chicken can be used to make 3 to 4 meals that will feed 3 people. Here are things I do with one chicken:
pull the meat and separate light from dark. Put the skin and the carcass and put into an instant pot with leftover wilty vegetables, bay leaf, and peppercorns and make chicken broth.
Use 1/2 the light meat for a protein in a salad
Use the other half of the light meat in either a stir fry or in filling for crepes or enchiladas. There usually enough leftovers to make at least one or two lunches.
Use the dark meat and chicken broth in soup or making chicken pot pie. There is usually enough leftovers to make two lunches.
I am not kidding when I say that the each of those meals is filling and delicious and costs well under $5 a serving.
This is called being frugal where you're not necessarily cheap, you're just not wasting anything.
So the headline is written to either enrage people and make clickbait or to generate "LULZ those poors can't afford things because they're (checks notes) eating".
As a side note, a bag of avocados at Costco is also a loss leader at $0.75 per avocado. Don't believe me? My local grocery store sells avocados at $1.50 each when they're on SALE. It's, frankly, a good deal. Two pieces of bread, one avocado and some pepper or "everything but the bagel" seasoning and you've got a pretty damn good, filling breakfast.
Here is part of a meal I made for my family: coronation chicken - which is a chicken salad made with chicken breast meat, mayo, yogurt, apricot jam, curry, and almonds.
Here is a video about turning a whole chicken into high end chicken broth (he uses the entire chicken, but TBH you can use just the carcass and skin and end up with very good broth):
Even if you use the whole chicken, his recipe will make several quarts of amazing broth that ends up costing way less than grocery store broth. Even with just the carcass and skin, this makes better broth than store bought. And it freezes well. To freeze broth, after it's cooled, you can portion it into silicone muffin pans. When frozen, pop them out into put them into an air tight freezer bag. The silicone is to make it easier to remove and the reason for the using them is that each cavity is usually 1/2 C so you're preportioning. Need 2C of broth? Grab 4 pucks. Also, the puck form factor melts reasonably quickly.
Here is a recipe for savory crepes that use chicken:
With regards to the crepes, if you understand the basics of cooking, this recipe comes down to: crepes filled with chicken and gruyere topped with a mornay sauce. Now a traditional mornay sauce is made with gruyere, which is expensive, but you can substitute so many other cheeses that will work just fine, like cheddar, havarti, jack, or gouda.
If you watch Jean-Pierre's videos, he's doing very traditional French cooking, but he's simplifying a lot of the steps to make things more approachable. What he's omitting are the things that you might do in a restaurant when you have the resources to dedicate to them in prep because you're going to make dozens of servings. At the same time, he injects a bunch of hacks that really smart. For example, if you don't have home made beef stock on hand (which, like the above chicken broth is far, far, better than store bought), he shows how you can make it better by adding tomato paste. He doesn't explain why this works, but its actually really simple: tomatoes are rich in glutamates and store bought beef broth is heavily salted. When you mix the two, the tomato past thickens the broth and gives it more body and the salt in the broth and the glutamates make (tada) monosodium glutamate - instant umami. And no, MSG is not a bad thing in reasonable quantity.
tl;dr - the economy is fucked and the wall street journal is writing clickbait and fuck them because with some planning, you can use some knowledge to eat in a way that's healthy and frugal.
