Monday, January 14, 2013

A Week of Chicken: The Creative Chicken Menu Challenge

I would like to say that the whole "chicken challenge" thing came out of some great epiphany I had for doing new and different ways to cook chicken.  Unfortunately, for me anyway, that isn't the case.
See, I screwed up.  Royally.  I had bought two big packages of chicken thighs when I was at Carrs a while back.  They were on clearance and it was a good deal.  Rushed as I normally am and not thinking smart, which happens more than I care to admit, I stuck them in the freezer still in their big family sized packages.  So, I quickly had two huge chicken ice chunks in no time flat.

To compound my foul up, and you'll love this one, I took them out of the freezer with the idea that I'd defrost them just enough to separate them into separate freezer bags and refreeze them.  I've done this in the past and it worked pretty well.  Wellll, being rushed as I normally am and not thinking smart, which happens more often than I care to admit, I subsequently forgot about them.  Even though they were taking up the consistency of one shelf in my fridge.  For three whole days.

By the time I remembered the chicken was there, much cussing at my own stupidity filled my kitchen as I pulled two big packages of perfectly thawed chicken from my fridge.

I was at a cross roads.  I could try to refreeze said chicken and while it would work for soups and stews and such, for actual baking chicken the quality wasn't going to be great (remember for those in the lower 48 like 100% of the meat we get in Alaska IS previously frozen so this is chicken that has been thawed and then refrozen once).  Or, I was going to have to get REALLY creative with cooking over the next week to get my husband and daughter to eat chicken for seven days straight.

Course, being me and loving a challenge brought about by my own stupidity, I decided to go with the seven days of chicken challenge.  So, the following recipes are the result of seven days of chicken meals.  And hey, I'm still here and I'm not divorced.  That's got to say something right *laugh*?

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