Friday, January 14, 2011

House Smells Awesome!

Okay, doing more food prep today!  Just poached chicken and also roasted some chicken breasts too.  Why poached do you ask.  Well it is a lean alternative to roasting.  When you roast your chicken with the skin on, all the fat from the skin is absorbed into the meat.  The other great thing about poaching it is that if you add some vegetables and herbs you will also make your own chicken stock.  Homemade chicken stock is the best way to insure you know what is in it and that you can control the amount of salt.  In fact you can poach the chicken without even adding salt to the stock.  That way you are ensuring that you are not over salting future recipes.

So once the chicken is cooled, I will shred it off the bone and store it in ziploc bags and put it in the freezer.  Now it will be ready on hand for when I want to make chicken salad sandwiches, bbq chicken pizzas, enchiladas and so on.  I will also freeze the stock for use in rices, soups and whatever else.  Pretty cool huh.

Now I did roast about 4 of the breasts today for the Barefoot Contessa's Curry Chicken Salad Sandwich wraps.  A big favorite of ours.  Hard part is even though I don't know the calorie count, I can guess it is super high.  I mean a cup of roasted cashews for crying out loud - that is 680 calories right there (for the entire recipe that serves 6 ).  What I did do though is replaced her 1.5 cups of mayo for 1 cup Greek yogurt and only .5 cup of mayo, so that should help a little! 

Since the diet doesn't officially start yet, we are going to enjoy these Curry sandwiches without the quilt darn it!  It is such a beautiful day that I am going to pack them up for a picnic dinner at the beach with my family.  It is going to be awesome!

1 comment:

  1. Okay, I just went in to tear off the skins and shred the chicken. I kept the poached chicken separated from the roasted chicken. Let me just say that you would not believe the amount of grease and fat left on the roasted tray compared to the poached tray!!!

    Now granted the roasted chicken was rubbed with olive oil, but that is a minuscule contributor. The poached chicken was mostly juice with very small amount of fat in it. I mean very small!

    I love Ina Garten and all, but I can honestly say that I don't think I will be roasting chicken anymore. Holy Cow!

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