Fry your own chicken, after you break it down yourself.

How much is a bucket of chicken? Few pieces of chicken tenders? Popcorn chicken? Chances are, you would still save money buying a whole free range chicken and breaking it down yourself then frying it. I understand the excuse of being too busy, but I think it would be much easier to make time to cook for ourselves when we ask ourselves what exactly goes in to our food when it's made outside. What chemicals go in to preparing the food that we eat from fast food places? All that will end up inside us and there's no way of getting around that. It's up to us to make the choices that leads to a better quality of life for ourselves and more importantly, to our kids.

Going back to being too busy to break down chicken. Listen, it takes all but 5 minutes to do it. Even if you can care less about all the reason as to why you should do it, I have one reason, which to this day still motivates me to do it. It makes me feel like a Ninja Assassin.

Make the long story short, whole chicken was on sale for $0.99 per pound and that my friends is not too shabby. No it wasn't free range but felt like it was free when boneless, skinless chicken breasts go for $4 per pound. HA!  This post was suppose to be a 2 part where I break down the chicken then have a fried chicken recipe, but alas, Mom woke up and saw the chicken and made Adobo. Luckily, I had the legs and thighs separated...and hidden. 

first step is to remove the wishbone. (which I didn't take a photo of..grrr) make two small slits along the collar of the chicken and pull the wishbone out.

 slice the wings off at the joint. this is cartilage so it will just slice off. no need to hack away! :)

 cut through the skin that separates the thighs and breast 

 pull the thighs apart to separate the bones at the joint

 run your knife as close to the bone as possible all the way through the spine until both thighs are free

 right where the skin ends, feel for the spot where the joint connecting the thigh and legs. you will easily cut through the cartilage separating the two

 at this point, you can hold the whole upper torso and pull down the ribs and spine and cut the rest of the way.

 this is the keel bone. you can run your fingers under the thin film to expose it then pull it right off

at this point, you can cut the drummettes then cut the ribs away from the breast and skin off. use for chicken tenders, popcorn chicken or just grill them off.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

note: save all the bones in the freezer for you chicken stock.