chicken Archives - Lazy Man and Money

McFly, Are You Chicken?

May 30, 2017 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

True story: Some people call me McFly as a nickname. I was never a fan of that nickname. I prefer the nicknames my gradeschool friend gave me – M.C. Farms or Drumlin. They caught on for a few years, but didn’t follow me to college.

Also, nobody calls me chicken:

Today is the exception, I’m chicken. Well I’m not really chicken, but I have a lot of chicken.

Click image for a larger view

To my wife: I’m sorry. I know we agreed we should eat down the food. I can’t control myself when it comes to a deal. What am I supposed to do when the grocery store practically throws me food for free?

The whole chicken on the left is $0.69 a pound. Yes, there are bones, but we could easily get a couple of meals of the $2.70 I paid for the nearly 4 pounds. If we broke down the math, I think it would be cheaper than dog treats for my dog… and he likes chicken a whole lot more.

That’s not the chicken I’m looking to write about in this image. I grossly overpaid for that whole chicken.

It’s the rest of the chicken that is worth writing about.

A quick look at the label shows that these packages are $0.99 a pound, much more than the $0.69 I paid for the whole chicken.

However, Tyson wants to give me a $1.25 discount on each package.

Thank you Tyson. I accept your offer. This table sums up the deal.

	Pounds	Price Before	Price After
Package 1	1.95	$1.93	$0.68
Package 2	2.01	$1.99	$0.74
Package 3	1.74	$1.72	$0.47
Package 4	2.02	$2.00	$0.75
Package 5	1.81	$1.79	$0.54
Totals	9.53	$9.43	$3.18

Average Price Per Pound	$0.33 !!!

There were packages priced around $3.00, but the key to the deal was to buy the lowest weight (and priced) packages. The packages that were around 1.75 pounds were 50 cents.

Overall, I paid $3.18 for around 9.5 pounds of chicken. That’s $0.33 a pound!

I’ll throw this chicken on the grill with some BBQ sauce and it will be fabulous. If we eat 2 pounds of chicken per meal, we’ll spend less than $0.75 cents on what is typically the most expensive part of the meal.

If grocery stores are going to give me chicken this cheaply, they can call me McFly until the cows come home. I won’t be needing cows anyway.

What’s going on with chicken? How can this be so cheap?

If this article seems familiar, you are probably thinking of my Aldi find: Rich Chicken, Poor Chicken.

Rich Chicken, Poor Chicken

March 23, 2017 by Lazy Man 12 Comments

Today I’d like to tell you the story of two people shopping at grocery stores for some chicken. One person runs through the grocery store quickly buying the items he needs (including chicken) and gets out of there paying little attention to money. The other person takes a little more time, not a lot, to pay attention to any particular deals. We are going to focus on their chicken purchases today. We’ll call them Rich Chicken and Poor Chicken*.

I’m going to play the part of Rich Chicken, the person who spends a little more time to find the deals. Last week, Rich Chicken found the chicken deal of lifetime! Even though his wife had warned them that they had too much chicken, Rich Chicken does what Rich Chicken does… buys chicken.

What does a deal of a lifetime look like? This:

You can click on the image for an even bigger one to get the details on the pricing. Pay no attention to the dates, I’m writing this article long after the chicken had been frozen in our chest freezer. The sell-by date was the next day.

The big picture (pun intended) is that each of these packages of chicken are on sale $5 off… and they are only around $7 to begin with.

I’ll give you the details so that you don’t have to squint on that picture. Before the discounts on the packages I would have spent a total of $21.35 for 14.33 pounds of chicken in the three packages (including the devil chicken package at the bottom). That would have been $1.49, which is a great price for boneless, skinless chicken breast under normal circumstances.

After the $15 in discounts ($5 per package), I spent $6.35 for 14.33 pounds of chicken or around 44 cents a pound.

Maybe you are thinking I just changed the discount from $1 to $5 with a magic marker at home. Nope, here’s part of my receipt:

Poor Chicken Shopping

Now let’s look at Poor Chicken. Maybe he’s in a rush (aren’t we all sometimes?), but let’s presume he’s just not mindful of his shopping spending. Maybe he’s got a bunch of other things on his mind. For whatever reason, he doesn’t see this chicken deal in plain sight. Many other shoppers missed the deal as well. There were plenty of packages available that I didn’t buy and I waited a few extra minutes to see people pass it by.

A couple of days of later, Poor Chicken decides he wants chicken for dinner. Unfortunately now, he’s at a different grocery store. This chicken isn’t on sale. Typically, I see boneless, skinless chicken at $2.99… more if it’s organic. He might only buy a pound or two now, so it isn’t that big of deal. However, let’s assume that over some time he buys (the convenient amount of) 14.33 pounds of chicken.

Poor Chicken spends $42.85, while Rich Chicken spends $6.35. For some people that $36.50 isn’t that big of deal. This is an extreme example as well. However, all these mindful shopping decisions add up. I can’t even begin to estimate how much that is when you multiply it across many shopping trips over a lifetime.

There’s a lot of debate in personal finance about whether it is better to make more money or save more money. I think there’s room for both. A penny saved is a penny earned, which is a penny that can be invested.

* The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), chickens, places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Budget Hack: Shredded Chicken

June 2, 2015 by Lazy Man 6 Comments

A few weeks ago, I noticed a sale at the local grocery store… boneless, skinless chicken breast for $1.77 a pound. Usually a good sale is $1.99/lb.

This article isn’t about capitalizing on that 10% difference between the sale prices. It is about the sale price of chicken in general. For years now I’ve seen that $1.99/lb. price. Who knew that chicken had an immunity to inflation?

Beef, on the other hand, has lost its battle to inflation. It’s gotten so pricey that I resorted to mixing ground turkey and beef. By the way, that was a winning experiment… no one could tell the difference, it was healthier, and it saved money.

Chicken seems to be a big win. Most health advocates seem to agree it is a healthier alternative to beef. I rarely see the healthier food priced at a discount.

At the $1.77 sale, I bought a lot of chicken…. maybe 10 pounds. I separated a large amount of it an put it in individual bags in our chest freezer.

The question became what to do with the rest of the chicken? I had a good 3-4 pounds. I thought getting a recipe book, but I’m not much of a recipe kind of person. Instead I took out my slow cooker. I added a little water and the chicken and left it on low for a few hours.

I came back to something that looked like boiled chicken. If there’s anything that lacks taste more than boiled chicken, it is called “water.”

As I hoped, the chicken shredded very easily in a bowl. I now had shredded chicken to eat throughout the week. I added it to nachos to make them more of a lunch. I had it in a sandwich with cheese and guacamole. I had it in a burrito with salsa, pinto beans, and rice (super cheap meal!). Can you tell that I’m currently on a Mexican food kick?

I also added it to our dog’s food and he ate right away for the first time in a long time.

My sense of taste is not very strong, so this may not be for everyone. However, I’ve found that when it is combined with other ingredients, it isn’t like eating boiled chicken by itself.

I may just be over-excited about all the different uses I found for it, but it feels like it will become a staple in our house. Cheap staples are important, because they can curb the “I’ll just grab a meal while I’m out” urges. Saving $5 here and there really adds up.

Next time I buy chicken, I’m thinking of shredding more of it to start and using my FoodSaver (Review) to freeze it for awhile. I use this FoodSaver Wide-Mouth Jar Sealer with mason jars so that I don’t have to pay for special bags over and over again.

I’ll just pull them out of the freezer, thaw them in the fridge (or in warm water), and enjoy the shredded chicken.

Do you have any budget food hacks? Let me know in the comments.

Saving Money with Ground Turkey and Beef

February 20, 2015 by Lazy Man 5 Comments

Over the past year, I’ve seen the price of beef skyrocket at my grocery store. A couple of years ago, I’d be able to get 93% lean ground beef for well less than $3 a pound at the local military commissary. It was the best price in town.

Lately, I’ve seen prices of over $4 a pound. The prices for even 80% lean ground beef is over well over $3 now.

As a result, I’ve steadily been opting for poultry such as skinless, boneless chicken breast that is usually priced at $1.99 or less. A great side-benefit of that is that recent guidelines advocate lean meat.

The only problem: It’s hard to make burgers out of whole chicken breasts.

This past week, Aldi was having a sale on ground beef. The sale illustrates how high prices have risen. You could buy 5lbs of 73% lean beef in bulk at a price of $2.89. At the same time, I noticed something next to it… ground turkey at $2.79.

Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this. What if I mixed ground beef and ground turkey and froze the result?

A spreadsheet can help us look at the results:

	Pounds	Price/pound	Total Price	Percent Lean	Lean Meat
Ground Beef	5	$2.89	$14.45	73%	3.65
Ground Turkey	2.4	$2.79	$6.70	93%	2.23
Sum	7.4	$2.86	$21.15	79%	5.88

Focus on the bolded data above. The average price per pound of my Franken-meat is $2.86 and it is 79% lean. That’s better than paying $3.29 for 80% lean. From a numbers perspective, I could have simply gone with all ground turkey and had 93% lean meat at $2.79 a pound.

Of course, food isn’t all about the cost or the fat percentage. It is about taste too. I’m banking on the fact that by having twice as much beef as turkey, my burgers will still taste like beef burgers, not turkey burgers.

I had hoped to find someone on the internet that has done this before and reported on the taste. Maybe my searching skills have gone way down, but I couldn’t find a single record on the internet. I did find some tips suggesting that I could grind my own ground beef and save money that way. That’s interesting. If I’m going to grind meat, I might as well consider grinding chicken breast (at $1.99) or chicken thighs (even cheaper).

Maybe the right mix could get prices below $2 a pound, with good nutrition, and still taste good? If nothing else, it seems like a fun experiment.

I’ll have to come back and update this article with the results of the taste test.

If this experiment comes out well this Sunmile 1HP Meat Grinder that I found on Amazon looks to be the way to go. At a sale price of $80 today, I’m tempted to jump on it.