Enhance your reputation as the family cook with inexpensive gourmet

Enhance your reputation as the family cook with inexpensive gourmet chicken recipes!

Last week's grocery shopping trip was a deflating experience, both to my desires as a cook and, more importantly, to my food budget! I love to cook and have been making up dishes since I was about 12 years old. Some of my creations have been miserable failures that even our dog said Hmmm ... catch ya later to, but on the plus side, I've accumulated a number of menus that are family favorites.

Like every cook, my weekly shopping list includes certain regular items. This past week, I had to wonder what's going on with food prices. Cream cheese was almost double the previous week's price, making our usual bagel and cream cheese breakfast a sudden luxury! My beloved mid-morning beverage, a can of peach juice, went from 37 cents to 50 cents and the store had not a single can.

I have more ways to cook chicken than you might ever imagine possible. Chicken is the chameleon of meats. Perusing the meat aisle, I saw that the price of chicken has bumped up, but not by much. Emergency shopping list modification! OK. Now what have I got in my little bag of chicken tricks? A whole bunch of gourmet chicken recipes that are both inexpensive and taste like a dish you'd expect at a fine restaurant.

The secrets to gourmet chicken recipes are few, simple and, best of all, inexpensive. Yes, we're all familiar with fried chicken, chicken fried rice and the chicken Chef's salad, but these dishes are nothing to write home about. Let's see how you can transform plain, inexpensive chicken meat into gourmet chicken recipes.

Those ten-pound bags of chicken legs in the freezer section at the supermarket are a good buy providing you use the product wisely. Most often, these bags contain not only the legs, but all of the fat. However, when you price skinned, boneless chicken breasts against the per-ounce price, it's easy to see that a properly used bag of fatty legs is the better buy. You might well ask, How?

Let's first look at an idea bank for chicken meat. Then we'll tackle using that fat to your profit.

Each of the following ingredients should be the pillars of your gourmet chicken recipe repertoire:

1.Chinese Five-Spice is a combination of spices that, served with a chicken and rice dish, emboldened with brightly colored and crunchy veggies, conjures up images of heaven on a fork.

2.A packet of sweet and sour sauce is all you need to produce a gourmet chicken recipe. Remove the skin from your chicken and bake until done. Allow the chicken to cool and then dice the meat into bite sized chunks. Open a can of diced pineapple chunks, coarsely chop a sweet onion, finely slice a few green onions and mix it ll up. Serve over a bed of rice and ladle a few tablespoons of the sweet and sour sauce over the chicken mixture. This is an easy gourmet chicken recipe which is also easy to love.

3.Lemon sauce is available in those handy packets as well. It's a five minute task which yields an exotic base for julienned, cooked chicken breasts. Serve this gourmet chicken recipe on a bed of rice, garnished with snow peas, for a sensational, mouth watering meal.

4.The combination of ginger, orange juice, carrots and chicken meat can't be beat. Slice a couple of large carrots in inch chunks. Combine the carrot slices, a half cup of frozen orange juice and a teaspoon of powdered ginger in a medium sized saucepan, over medium heat. When warmed, stir in a teaspoon or two of cornstarch to thicken the sauce. Cook for about ten minutes, or until the carrots are done. Reduce the heat to low. Serve this mixture over rice. Garnish each serving with snips of very finely sliced green onions for a colorful and eminently tasty dish.

5.Mushrooms and chicken go hand in hand. You can use plain white mushrooms, but a more interesting mixture can be had with the addition of fresh portabellos and a selection of dried mushrooms, available in most supermarkets. Saute a variety of mushrooms, then toss in your chicken. Set the mixture aside while you boil up a batch of linguine. Add a jar of Alfredo sauce to your chicken, sprinkled with shredded Parmesan cheese. Dish out the linguine, top with the chicken and mushroom mixture and top it off with fresh snow peas.

6. Now, what to do with the fat you've stripped from the chicken? You've got a freebie here. Put all that fat and skin into a stockpot and cook up a flavorful batch of chicken stock. Toss in a bouquet garni. Use a skimmer to de-fat the stock. Freeze the stock in 8-cup portions, to use as soup or gravy stock.

Each of these six gourmet chicken recipes is sure to be a hit at your table. So easy and inexpensive!

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