Friday, January 16, 2009

Another Leftover Makeover Meal

Remember my not so frugal dinner mishap from last week??? The mistake of too much spice in my homemade chicken stew!?!!

Instead of dumping the pot of leftovers and wasting the food, I decided to hang on to the leftovers from the mistake to see if I could possibly turn what was left into another dinner...basically trying to make another leftover makeover meal.  

I was successful!!  I managed to make another dinner meal for all seven of us plus a lunch meal for about half of us!


I added a can of broth and water.  I then added flour/cornstarch/milk mixture to the stew, basically working towards a milk gravy consistency.  For part of the milk, I used about 1/3 cup plain yogurt.  I added about 1 tbsp. minced onion.  I added 4 more diced, raw potatoes to the stew because the other potatoes had almost "dissolved" into the liquid that didn't get dumped out when we initially finished the too spicy stew.   I brought the stew to a boil to cook the potatoes. While the potatoes were cooking through I cooked some buttermilk biscuits.  Once the potatoes were cooked through, I added about 8 oz. shredded cheddar cheese to the stew/chicken pie filling.  Adding the cheese helped to cool the mixture down some without adding more liquid.

Once everything was heated through, I served the chicken veggie mixture which was about the consistency of pot pie filling over the buttermilk biscuits.  It was yummy!  

To think that I only used 5 boneless skinless chicken breasts in this pot of stew!  I was able to get 2 1/2 full meals out of the whole mixture!  Now I am feeling like my not so frugal dinner turned into a frugal dinner for my family!

The lesson learned from this experience is don't be afraid to try to rework or makeover a meal that did not turn out right the first time!

For other frugal tips, recipes, and resources, head over to Biblical Womanhood!  This week, Crystal has links for getting birthday freebies!

1 comment:

Stacy said...

Don't you just love it when you are able to fix those kinds of "mistakes?"