Bundt Pan Chicken

Tonight I made bundt pan chicken with parmesan bacon potatoes. I know it looks silly but the chicken came out delicious! There is really nothing to cooking a chicken in a bundt pan- you just plop the chicken on the pan, grease it up with some olive oil and cake on some pepper and salt.

As far as the potatoes go I used this recipe for them (less the chicken part of the recipe). Instead of cooking the potatoes for 30 minutes before adding the chicken I put everything in the oven at the same time. I also periodically mixed the potatoes to make sure the ones on top didn't dry out.

We also had parmesan asparagus- well I had it because no one else in my house shares my love for asparagus. The non-asparagus lovers had beets in vinegar instead which i find to be gross.

Here is what the chicken looked like on the plate- a little less silly.

After dinner I took all of the leftover meat off of the chicken to use on Wednesday night for buffalo chicken wraps.

But wait, there's more.

To get even more out of the delicious chicken I decided to make my own chicken stock with it. I put the chicken in a large stock pot and added some onions that were almost expired, a few bay leaves, salt, pepper and some carrots that were in the freezer (they were going bad so I froze them awhile ago). I simmered everything for a couple of hours- it made the house smell wonderful!

I then put a colander into a smaller stock pot, lined it with a plain white paper towel (you should use cheesecloth but I don't have any and paper towels seem to work well for me- I just have to make sure to change them out frequently) and poured the stock through. Once done it looked like this. I let it cool on the counter and when it was cool enough I put it into the fridge. Tomorrow I will skim off any fat and may boil the stock down a bit if I don't think the flavor is strong enough. Then I will freeze it in one cup increments to use in future recipes. Not only is this a very cheap thing to do (most of the stuff I used would have just been thrown away) but it is so much more healthy to make it yourself because you can control what goes into it.

So, from one 5 pound chicken that I paid about $2.50 for (gotta love markdown meat) I will have gotten two really tasty meals and a ton of chicken stock to use in future recipes.