As if you couldn’t tell, I am in energy saving mode this season. With the heat in our home set at 70 during the day and 65 during the night, it is going to be an expensive fall, winter, and spring. Especially since it is predicted that energy bills will be 5% higher. Since I can’t set the heat down because Hubby is always cold, I am finding other ways to try to keep our utility bill reasonable.
One of the ways I do this is to bake a lot of items at once in our oven. Another way is to roast more than one poultry item at a time. I did that yesterday.
I thawed 2 frozen chickens(that I purchased at our rock bottom price of $.79 a lb.) both about 7 1/4 lbs. and roasted them at the same time in my turkey roasting pan.
When they were done, we took one and used it for dinner last night. We will be eating leftovers for the weekend and beyond. Tonight will be all the leftovers from our chicken dinner last night. Tomorrow will be hot chicken sandwiches. These two chickens made a delicious gravy and a lot of it.
I removed all of the meat from the other chicken after our dinner and used the food saver to package it up for the freezer. Then I used my large crock pot to make broth using the bones and skin from the carcasses. That cooked overnight. Some will be used for soup on Monday and some was frozen in a jar for soup when we eat the second chicken. I sliced some of the meat up and diced some of it. The little bits and pieces will get thrown in soup. The diced will be for casseroles, skillet dishes, and the soup. The sliced will be for sandwiches.
Not only did cooking two at a time save us energy, it also saved me time and less dishes to wash than if I cooked twice. Big pans aren’t my favorite thing to scrub.
So the next time you go to turn your oven on, think about what you can put in there for more than one meal and make it do double or triple duty and save energy at the same time.