Chicken Starter Kit

This is an easy way to prepare for future meals without alot of cost or effort.

Ingredients

• Family packs of boneless & skinnless chicken breasts
• 1 stalk celery
• 6 sprigs of parsely
• 1 onion
• 1 carrot
• water

Instructions

• Rinse chicken breasts and put in bottom of a large pot
• Add celery, parsely, peeled onion, and carrot whole on top of chicken breasts
• Add water until everything is covered by about an inch
• Bring to a boil
• Reduce heat and simmer until chicken is done...depending on how vigorous your simmer is, this can be anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes
• Remove chicken from water and allow to cool about 5 minutes
• Slice into strips or cut into cubes
• Freeze in bags for future use, mark with date

Suggestions

• I buy very large all-natural chicken breasts. There usually aren't any more than 6 in the family pack because they are so big. So I usually freeze two breasts per bag (sliced or cubed), and that helps me cut costs and measure pretty evenly between the bags.
• When I cube the chicken, I measure cupfuls so Iknow for a cubed-chicken recipe how many bags I would need to defrost. I typicallly freeze in 4 cup bags, but I think I am going to switch to bags that hold 2 cups.
• Buy quality freezer bags, and take time to wash them and reuse them. Turn a cup upside down and put the wet bag over the cup to dry.
• Make sure you are squeezing all the air out of the bags before you seal them.
• I like to add a cup or so of the broth that is in the pot to the bags. The flavor is really good later on.
• Strain out the vegetables and herbs, and freeze the broth for a chicken soup later on down the road. The first time you do this you may want to immediately make chicken soup, but probably not every time.