Five pounds of chicken for $1.38
So we never did go anywhere today…except for Shaw’s, to buy some groceries. Mike slept late, and by the time we were fully awake, it was getting too late to go all the way up to Kennebunkport, to the Trolley Museum.
I’m not especially heartbroken over this, even though it means no Federal Jack’s today. Oh, well, we can go there some other time. It won’t be going anywhere!
But we needed some stuph, so we went to Shaw’s. After our delicious meal at Jasper White’s Summer Shack on Wednesday, I dug out my copy of his Summer Shack Cookbook, wanting to se exactly WHAT he puts into that fried clam breading. It’s something he calls a “New England fry mix”, and it consists of half fine corn meal (masa harina), half regular flour, salt, pepper, and a little cayenne pepper.
He also uses this for his fried chicken recipe, and I decided that I wanted to try making that. We’ve never tried Jasper’s fried chicken at his restaurant, we always get seafood there. So I’ll try making it at home, instead. In addition to the New England fry mix, it also uses a special seasoning salt recipe: salt, lemon pepper, granulated garlic, Old Bay seasoning, oregano, hot pepper flakes, and flour. I mixed up batches of both the fry mix and salt, and then went to the store.
Shaw’s had chicken leg quarters on sale for 69 cents a pound. That’s cheap enough, but I saw one package that had a $2.00 off coupon on it. The sell-by date was for tomorrow, which is when I plan to make the fried chicken. This package of chicken weighed a little over five pounds, and was marked $3.38. But with the two buck off coupon, it only cost $1.38. Now there’s a good deal that you don’t see every day!
I butchered them up into thighs and drums after we got home…so glad I took Alton Brown’s advice and bought a pair of metal snips from Home Depot, to use for poultry shears. Leg quarters come with a bit of the backbone still attached, and it’s nice to remove. So much easier to do that with heavy-duty metal snips! Some of those scissors that pass for “poultry shears” at kitchen stores are a joke. My old ones have now be relegated to cutting open packages and stuph.
Of course, I saved the backbones that I cut off, they will be used to make chicken stock, for gravy. Maybe I’ll make biscuits, too, if I feel like it, to have with the fried chicken and mashed potatoes and corn.
I did make the spaghetti dinner last night, and we have a shitload of sauce left over. I got the idea that I wanted meatball subs, so I bought a bag of frozen meatballs at the store today. I dumped them into the slow cooker, and mixed in some of the leftover sauce. Nice and easy, and I don’t have to bother with it. We will have those tonight.
I’m also making a couple of loaves of French bread, to cut up to make sub rolls. I start the dough in the bread machine, and just use a DOUGH cycle, then they come out, are shaped into the baguettes, left out to rise one more time, and then baked in the oven. Way better than the supermarket variety!
Yummie! 
