QUICK & AFFORDABLE MEALS: 5 DOLLAR DINNERS: EASY CHICKEN MEALS

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. In today's video, I'm going to share with you another $5 dinners. I have not done this in a couple of months and this one I decided I was going to share with you some recipes that included chicken. So I have not shared any $5 dinners with chicken because obviously chicken is expensive. So I'm going to share with you how I'm breaking down the price of this for each meal to be around $5. Um, I will share with that in a couple of minutes, but basically I'm buying my chicken in bulk and I'm buying it whenever it's on sale and at a better price. These are for $5 dinners and then the last one isn't a $5 meal, but it is my favorite chicken recipe to date. It's amazing. You want to stick around for that one, but I hope you enjoy. Um, all of the products down below are listed with prices. I priced them with Walmart. Obviously if you live in a different location, you need to take that into consideration. I live in Texas and everything's pretty cheap here. So I hope you enjoy and I will see you after the video. So how I'm going to use this chicken for my $5 dinners is I'm going to look at my price, which is $6.27 and $6.24. So if I add them up, it's going to be around $12 and 50 cents, which if I divide into five meals, it ends up being around like $2 and 50 something cents a meal. So I bought chicken legs because they were the cheapest at Aldi, a dollar 69 a pound. When I'm buying chicken for meals, it's usually just what I do. I buy whatever is on sale. So I went with this. I'm not really picky about it for these meals because they are going to be cut up and shredded. So it's not going to matter like what the chicken looks like and there's nothing wrong with leg meat. So I'm going to use this for my meals. So that's how the money is broken up. All right. So the first thing I'm going to show you is chicken and rice. This is one of my husband's like favorite all time meals. It's really simple and cheap. So you just need chicken. I'm only going to use like two legs. So about a pound to two pounds depending on how meaty you want it. I'm going to use just a pound of rice. So I'm going to use half. I'm going to use one lift and onion soup mix for seasoning and I'm going to use a cream of mushroom. If I need more, I would use another cream of mushroom, but I have a cream of chicken so you can make it work if you don't have both. But I like cream of mushroom better and my all time favorite uncle Chris's. If I didn't put this in this, my husband would be like, what? So there you go. So the trick to making this taste good I have found is that I spray my casserole dish and make sure it's a big one and I lay my chicken in here. So I'm going to link an article. I'm just saying this because if this video gets a lot of views, there's always people. It's not really my followers, but it's people who just want to say things. Comment that I don't wash my meat. Well, I'm linking an article. The FDA says you don't have to. It's actually riskier to wash your meat and spread germs by splashing of water and transferring your meat. It's riskier. So the less transfer of your meat, the better. That's why I don't wash my meat because if you cook it at a high enough temperature, you don't need to. So let me wash my hands. All right. So my chicken, I'm going to cook in this pan first. So I used to cook the chicken separately. I would boil it or whatever. But I found that if you cook it in the pan, it leaves chicken juices like brothy stuff in the pan. And then you use this to actually like cook your casserole in and the juices just make it taste so much better versus like boiling it and losing all the chicken juice. Sounds gross, but you know what I mean? I'm going to put a little bit of Uncle Chris's and I'm going to put this in the oven at 425 I guess for like 30 minutes until all of it is completely cooked. You want to make sure it is sealed and I'm going to push rice and it's going to go for 12 minutes and it's going to be perfect. See what I mean about all like chicken juice. Like this is what's going to give it flavor. So I shredded it and now my rice perfectly cooked. Okay, so this is basically done. I only used one cream of mushroom. If I had more rice, I would add more. It just depends on how like mushy or dry you want it. Um, but I'm going to put it back in the oven. I left the oven on from earlier and this is basically just going to heat it up since the rice and the chicken are already cooked. All right, so for this recipe I'm going to share with you how to make homemade chicken pot pie. This is one of my favorite meals. It sounds kind of intimidating, but it's really easy to make. All right, so I have about a pound and a half of chicken. I'm going to put this in the oven and I'm going to let it cook. You could boil the chicken or you could buy a rotisserie chicken and just pick chicken off and it would go faster, but I'm going to cook this. And while this is cooking, I'm going to let my pie crust start thawing. Okay, so in your pan you were going to take half a stick of butter and let it melt and then you're going to add your chicken broth and then you're going to slowly start to whisk in flour and this is going to make like the battery paste inside the chicken pot pie. Then you're going to slowly pour in your milk making sure that it doesn't burn. So you want to be stirring a lot and continue to whisk in your flour and make sure it doesn't sit too long without stirring or it'll burn. And once it's at a good consistency, then I will add in the vegetables and the chicken. Okay, so this is what it looks like right now. You can add more flour, make it thicker. We prefer more like chicken and vegetables versus like the batter. So just depends on whatever you'd like. Okay guys, so for this meal, this is one of my favorite easy recipes like ever. This is chicken fried rice. My kids love it. I love it. It's really simple to make. All you need is mixed vegetables like a pound of chopped up chicken, a few eggs, soy sauce and rice of your choice. Okay, so I'm going to be cooking this in my instant pot. I think that this is the easiest way, the fastest way to cook this meal. However, you can just do this like on a skillet on your stove top and just boil the rice separately. But I'm going to start by putting two cups of rice in my instant pot. I'm going to cook it on the rice setting and once that has done cooked, once that is done cooking, I will show you how to add everything else in. Okay, so now that my rice is cooked, I'm going to make a spot where the pan can cook the eggs. So that's really all that you need. And I'm going to switch this to saute and if you were doing this like on a stove top, you would just combine it like on high heat. So I'm going to crack a couple of eggs and I'm going to let it sit there and like scramble them. And that's how you're going to like incorporate the egg mixture into the rice. The one and only. All right, so this is about cooked and now I'm going to stir. Okay, so if you wanted to go for a meatless option, I would stop here. Um, but once my chicken is done cooking, I'm going to shred it and add it in here and it's basically it. Chicken recipe is called Ritz chicken and so basically you cook your chicken however you want to. You can boil it, you can cook it in the oven. I cooked it in the oven and made sure it was all the way done. Now I'm going to shred it and cut it up. I'm going to add in cream of chicken and then I'm going to add in a small thing of sour cream. I'm going to mix it all together with the chicken and then I'm going to top it with Ritz crackers and some butter. It's really good. All right, so this is done. It's going to go in the oven at 350. It's basically done like the meat's done. So you're just heating everything up but you don't want to cook it too long or too high because the crackers will burn. You also don't have to use as much butter as I did and this is the best meal ever. Thanks so much for watching everyone. I hope that you enjoyed. Give this video a thumbs up if you liked it and comment down below some more video ideas you would like for me. I'm thinking about trying some Starbucks um, coffee recipes for at home for cheaper. Let me know if you would like that. I will see y'all again next time. Bye everybody.