Pro Chef Turns $30 Groceries into 3 Chicken Dinners

Grocery prices are totally out of control.

We're here today to look at

how you can make the most of your time and your money

by shopping wisely and using your ingredients

in smart ways in the kitchen.

I wanna show you how you can make pasta with chicken ragu,

a schmaltzy fried rice with blistered cabbage,

and a carnitas-inspired taco with cabbage and lime slaw

using a grocery bag that can cost you as little as $30.

[upbeat jazz music]

These are our groceries.

Virtually every ingredient here

I'm gonna use at least twice,

and the point is showing how every ingredient

can be used in multiple ways in multiple dishes.

Every dish I'm gonna do

is gonna be built around our hero ingredient,

our bone-in skin-on chicken thighs.

There are three distinct elements to that product,

one is the skin, one is the meat itself,

and then, the bones as well.

Each one has a purpose and a value.

So number one, I'm gonna take the skin off of the thighs,

is this a little bit of a manual,

kind of intense Hannibal-Lecter-like process?

Well, yes, it is, thanks so much for pointing it out, Kevin,

but here's the thing, being willing to do this work

means that the meat that you're gonna get from this chicken

is gonna be so much more adaptable for you

and it's gonna perform so much better

in a wide range of applications.

I like to remove the bone.

Removing the bone means

that things are gonna cook a lot faster

and it's gonna create a much more even piece of protein,

but I wanna keep that bone,

and there's a little bit of meat on there, but it's cool,

we're gonna use that, right?

Like, this isn't like...

Nothing's gonna go to waste.

I need to cut this meat up.

For the braised ragu we're gonna do with our rigatoni,

I want a slightly bigger piece, so we have bigger shreds

when it ultimately becomes nice and tender,

and for the taco filling, I wanna go slightly smaller

just so that things are really, like, bite-sized

and sit really comfortably in the tortilla.

Gonna make use of all these things.

To start, I'm gonna do our pasta with chicken ragu.

[upbeat funk music]

I wanted to do chicken ragu

'cause I wanted to show the potential for chicken thigh

to braise into a form of tenderness

that is really incredible,

and, like, who the heck doesn't want a chicken ragu

that's, like, actual braised luxurious pieces of meat

swimming in a very concentrated broth?

Okay, I wanna just grate my Parm.

All right, so we're going star hole.

Let me just show, like, what happens with the Microplane.

That's not bad, but again, like, this is like...

What happens with these finer wisps

is that they kind of mat down and they wanna clump up

in a way that these star-hole-grated Parm bits,

those are gonna disperse into your food

and not take up too much visual space when you go to plate.

We have all of our Parm grated.

Each recipe pretty much gets a head of garlic.

You can buy a head of garlic for about, like, a dollar.

Garlic's ability to build up the base of flavor

in virtually any dish is unmatched, unparalleled.

Always prefer to slice as opposed to chop,

I just find chopping just gets a little sticky and messy,

it takes longer than it's usually worth.

One thing I wanna talk about is scallions.

For our ragu, I thought about using onion

but I didn't necessarily want onion in every dish,

whereas a couple bunches of scallions, they can do it all,

they can do what an onion does

and they can kinda do what parsley does.

I'm gonna save the tops for garnish for this dish,

but all these bottoms, I'm gonna cut

into little kinda stubby rounds.

Same principles with the chicken,

I'm taking one ingredient and I'm using it in multiple ways.

We're ready for the stove.

We're gonna start with the chicken bones.

Now, we're assuming you have some kind of cooking fat.

I'm gonna use olive oil just because

I'm gonna want some olive oil later in the process.

I'm just gonna spread these bones into a single layer.

Bones are a really useful tool in the kitchen, right?

Part of how restaurants work

and part of how, like, a lot of different cuisines work

is they're taking advantage of all the flavor,

all the gelatin, all of the richness that bones can offer,

that goes for fish, that goes for chicken,

beef, you name it.

Throwing bones away is like throwing money away.

It's these brown bits that are gonna start to form

all across the bottom of the surface of the pan, all right?

That is, like, part of, you know, developing, like, fond,

which is sort of, like, those brown bits,

which you're gonna take advantage of in this recipe.

I'm taking the bones out

'cause I'm making room so we can sear off our chicken,

and the bones will be reintroduced later.

Everything's cool.

I wanna start bringing our chicken in,

and I might not add all of it in the initial go

'cause I don't wanna crowd it,

I don't want it to start to steam,

so I'm gonna hold back a little bit

just for this initial sear.

In searing it as well, you're also gonna be

building more fond on the bottom of the skillet, right?

Which is in turn creating more flavor,

so it's just layers on layers.

This is what we're talking about here,

chicken is deeply browned, we've got great fond,

this is the garlic that I prepped earlier,

that's gonna go in, I'm gonna give that

a minute or two head start

'cause the scallions are gonna cook

ultimately very quickly, lots of garlic,

and then, the scallions that we prepped earlier,

those can come in as well.

This is the scallion white and light green parts only,

and we just thinly sliced them straight across.

This is also a wonderful time

to just do a few cranks of black pepper.

A little bit of water now is gonna allow us

to scrape up all of this fond,

so as you can see, water picked up all that fond

on the bottom of the pot.

Here's where our seared-off bones are coming back in.

Those are gonna cook alongside the meat.

I can just pull them right out

once they've released all of their goodness into the broth.

The bones, easy to throw in, easy to take out.

Last thing, our little Parmesan rind friend here.

If you're using true Parmesan cheese,

the rind is the hard exterior of that wheel of cheese

that is formed as it's aged,

the flavor that is inherent in that little bit of rind

is incredible, it's really high in sort of, like, a...

Kind of a natural source of umami.

This will be at least an hour of braising time,

I'm gonna look for the chicken to be braise-y, fork tender,

kinda falling apart

so that I can kind of almost, like, shred it

right in the pot,

but we're gonna leave the bones and the Parmesan rind in

until we reach that end point.

All right, it's been an hour,

just basically, like, had the lid slightly askew.

In the pot, we've got our bones, we've got our chicken,

chicken is lovely and shred-y, check that out.

That's what we wanted, right?

So first step is remove the bones, remove the Parm,

the bones are basically done,

they've given up what they have to give us,

and what we're left with is this.

Just the back of the spoon should be enough

to just break this meat apart

and get us to a saucy, braise-y consistency

just so that you don't have

these big, obvious pieces of chicken hanging around,

if you wanted to use a potato masher,

you certainly could do that.

I just wanna take a quick taste.

This could use just, like, a splash of acid, you know,

something just, like...

Just to lighten it up a little bit,

we've created such deep and rich, savory flavors,

it's nice to have a little bit of a counterpoint to that.

I have a little bit of Frank's RedHot Wing Sauce,

totally random, right?

What I like about a splash of something like this,

whatever you have on hand,

even just, like, a leftover packet

from a picnic or takeout,

a little bit of acid with your heat,

so you're kinda getting a one-two punch there,

and I'm just talking about, like, a couple of drops.

We're using soy sauce in our stir fry.

A teaspoon of it here, little bit of extra stealthy umami,

you know, nobody's gonna taste soy sauce,

but it's gonna be incorporated

into that wonderful saucy matrix,

you're not gonna know it's there,

but it's gonna do a little bit

of quiet, heroic work in the background

along with our hot sauce, okay?

All right, so it's time to cook pasta.

I'm gonna salt our water here,

cook my pasta 12 minutes.

[cartoonish ringing]

I'm gonna turn up the heat on our sauce

and I'm just gonna start scooping the pasta right in there.

So I'm just looking for the moment

where this is looking like it's coated very nicely,

sauce to pasta, and then, the cheese can come in,

and I wanna work it in a little bit at a time,

just wanna make sure it kind of melts

and incorporates before adding more,

and as I'm adding cheese,

I can also add a splash more water,

just making sure we're preserving a little bit of sauciness.

I'm really happy with where this is looking right now.

We've got a little bit of extra sauciness, right?

Everything's nice, glossy, coated,

you know, you can keep kinda building it up from here,

but, you know, ultimately I don't wanna overcook the pasta.

I'd say we're good to plate this up.

All right, we're there.

Pasta's looking so beautifully glossy, sauce is clinging,

everything's happening, everything came together,

I'm feeling really good about this.

All right, getting into it here.

[upbeat funk music]

I mean, it's really good.

It's seriously really, really good,

and in terms of just, like, the flavor, you know,

that we've coaxed out of chicken,

it's, like, actually, like, pretty phenomenal.

I'm really pleased with how this one came out.

Rigatoni with chicken ragu is done,

got two more dishes to go.

Meal two, schmaltzy fried rice.

[upbeat funk music]

It's gonna be seasoned with a little bit of soy sauce

and with chili powder.

Aromatic veg included here are gonna be ginger,

scallion and garlic.

Eggs are gonna be the protein component of this dish.

Wildcard ingredient is the chicken skin.

Schmaltz literally means chicken fat,

so it's the fat that you get from chicken.

First, I needed to start by cooking off some rice

because the best fried rice is made with cooked,

cooled rice as your starting point.

No real magic here.

I like adding a little bit of salt to my rice

just for a head start on seasoning.

I like to bring it to a simmer, stir it a couple times,

agitate it, and then, lid it and walk away for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, we're gonna come over here

and we're gonna cook our chicken skin,

just giving it a little bit of a head start in neutral oil,

the reason being that there's not so much chicken skin here

and I don't wanna sear it, you know?

I want it to render out slowly

and I don't want things to brown too much

before it's had a chance to start

to really render some of that fat.

Think of this like bacon.

This is a process that's better done low and slow.

That is gonna be the preferential method every time.

Cabbage is a little bit divisive.

Depending on how you treat cabbage,

especially if you can do a hotter, faster sear,

it will take on the qualities that you think of, like,

when you think about, like, roasted or fried broccoli

or cauliflower, not just that, like,

kinda mushy cabbage whatever.

I'm gonna use about half of this head for the fried rice,

half of it is gonna be kept for our tacos.

Ready to go to the stove?

So for blistering the cabbage, I'm gonna use neutral oil.

I'm gonna start with that. I'm just gonna let that go.

I want that to just start to blister

and even char a little bit

before I start to agitate it and move it around.

So this is, again, you know...

The cooking process is part of

how we're getting the most out of this ingredient,

and that means spending a little bit of extra time

to make sure we're truly transforming its flavor

as well as its texture.

Chicken skin, just wanna point out, you know,

these pieces still need a little bit more time,

but, like, this super golden, very richly-browned stuff,

like, this is the action we're looking for here.

While this cabbage is going, we can prep our garlic,

ginger and scallion for the fried rice.

We're doing a fair amount of rice here,

a two-inch piece is not unwarranted,

ginger is only gonna show up

in one of my dishes that I'm doing,

but I think it's still worthwhile,

so point being, like, ginger, it has such unique flavor,

you don't necessarily want it

in every single dish all the time,

but in terms of what it's gonna deliver for our fried rice,

I think it's inclusion for, like, about a buck,

I think it earns its place.

More garlic. Always more garlic.

Slicing the garlic, it's just my preferred approach,

it's faster, it's cleaner, it cooks more evenly,

we're using just about a full head here.

It's not gonna be too much,

we've got a lot of rice to season and flavor up,

and we've got a limited set of ingredients

so the ones that we do have,

let's just make sure we're using them

to their full potential.

I started with two bunches of scallions,

I've gotta save half of this bunch for my tacos,

those are gonna go to the side,

the remaining three scallions from this bunch,

I'm going to just cut at a very steep bias

all along the length,

so I'm gonna use all of it at the same time in the rice.

Might hold back a little bit for a little bit of garnish,

meanwhile, I'm gonna pull off this cabbage.

[cabbage sizzling]

That can go right back on the tray.

That's good to go, and then, chicken skin,

everything is really nicely rendered

and it's gonna crisp up still further as it cools.

I think we're good to go there.

I love egg and fried rice, and I try to bulk it out

with veg usually more than proteins

just because again, protein's probably gonna be

the most expensive thing in terms of your ingredient list.

Just a light pre-scramble

just so that the eggs kinda start to set evenly.

That's it, let's go to the stove.

Neutral oil, hot non-stick skillet.

Eggs, I'm gonna season just lightly with salt

just to give a headstart of seasoning for this dish.

[light clattering]

This is more egg than you'd typically find

in most fried rices, but I just wanna get these eggs set,

and then, the rice is gonna come in.

So chicken fat, we can start to use some of it here.

[pan clattering]

This is our cooked, cooled rice,

which is beautifully separated into little grains,

like, kinda separating those clumps,

getting it to be lovely and just kind of fluffy

will give you a really nice headstart

in terms of putting the fried rice together.

So once your rice is in, just wanna break this up.

I just love fried rice

as a way to, you know, both use leftover rice,

but also just because it can absorb

so many different types of flavors.

That's almost all of my chicken fat done.

So we're getting some really good color on this,

see that, like, crackling, crisp layer of rice in there?

I'd say, like, the rice is just about halfway there,

which is awesome,

and I'm gonna make a little well in the center

to do our aromatic ingredients in,

I need a little bit extra fat here,

it's just enough room to kinda cook off your aromatics

while the rice is crisping, just give them a headstart

before they incorporate into the rice.

And now, the scallions,

so I'm just gonna leave this one more sec.

So we haven't used this yet, okay?

This is our chili powder, right?

That we're gonna use in our tacos,

why not use a little bit here, as well?

The majority of the flavor here is just dried chili pepper

and it has, like, a very paprika,

middle-of-the-road chili quality to it,

but just for bringing a little bit of heat

and a little bit of complexity,

also, I wanted to be really,

you know, judicious with my ingredients

and getting this to work for me in a couple places

is really gonna help me.

So scallions are incorporated,

now, boat's gonna start to feel a little full here,

so I can calm down the cooking process a little bit,

the texture of the rice is looking pretty good to me,

but I wanna get this cabbage in here

so it can warm back through,

and this is where we're gonna use our soy sauce

as a single-stop overall flavor enhancer,

salt additive, just kind of umami booster,

oh, man, soy sauce is pretty hard to beat, I gotta say.

[spoon clattering]

Yes. All right, ready to go.

[upbeat piano music]

All right. This is looking so good and it smells so good.

The way ginger just gets in there

and it just permeates things,

gives you such a wonderful aroma.

I just love it.

So this is some of our leftover scallion

just for an additional little pop of garnish there

and a little bit extra chicken skin, nice and crispy.

Yeah, and the chicken skin, it's really just intended

as a really crisp, super savory garnish just for fun,

just adds, like, just to the riot of textures

that we have going on here.

[upbeat piano music]

This doesn't just taste like,

Oh, this is, like, a side dish,

or you're kind of expecting something else,

it tastes like nothing was sacrificed to make it

and that's just the point.

All right, fried rice is done,

it is time to close out our recipes with our tacos.

[upbeat funk music]

I make a lot of tacos at home for my family,

I love the way that chicken thighs,

especially if you take the time to cut them yourself

to little bite-sized pieces, you can sear them so hard

such that they take on qualities reminiscent of carnitas.

So starting with the cabbage,

just to thinly shave it to get our slaw going,

I don't need a ton of slaw for these tacos,

so I'm gonna start by just doing lime juice, salt,

and I'm gonna hit this with olive oil

just because why not use an oil

that has a little bit of inherent flavor to it?

So I don't want anybody to be sick of scallion,

the thing is I wanna present scallion in a way

that is gonna read a little bit differently

and function a little bit differently in the final dish

so that the scallion kind of functions

as almost, like, the same scale as the cabbage and the slaw,

but we get a little bit of that raw allium punch to it,

and scallion's one of those, like, little chameleons,

you know, you can kinda do virtually anything with it.

Little Hail Mary idea here, I don't know,

happen if we made our own

little, like, chili-lime-mayo situation

to go on the bottom of our tortilla

before we assemble our taco?

So we used the egg in our fried rice, but got one left

and I'm hoping to make things count here

by making a little DIY aioli,

I'm gonna start with a little bit of acid,

a little pinch of salt, break it up.

I think a little bit of olive oil and aioli is good,

I think a lot of olive oil

can become very peppery and very overwhelming,

so I'm just gonna put in a little bit here,

and then, switch to vegetable,

but this is a pretty fast process.

Olive oil and vegetable oil

weren't necessarily on my ingredient list,

but whatever cooking fat you have on hand,

whatever type of oil you have,

all pretty much fair game here.

Let's get a little chili powder in there, little garlic.

[person whisking]

That is good. Done.

Another little wild card idea,

a lot of tortilla packages have more tortillas

than you can probably use in one night,

I was sort of inspired by that

and I thought, Why not crisp up some of the tortillas,

fry them up, you know, kinda use what you've got

and show it off in a few different ways?

Theme of the day here is if you've got an ingredient,

try to use it twice, maybe even three times,

if you bought an entire package of it

and you don't necessarily wanna use all of it just one way,

find something else to do with it

that'll give it a new life and a whole new dimension.

So now, this is maybe, like, a pound or just under meat,

but we wanna make it work real hard for us in these tacos.

I'm gonna season it pretty generously with salt,

a pretty generous amount of chili powder.

Now, lastly, I'm gonna take...

I don't even know if I'm gonna need all of this garlic,

I'm just gonna grate some of these cloves

right into our chicken.

Well, I think we're ready to go to the stove.

All right. Ready to do this.

Neutral oil.

This is for our tortilla strips, this is an experiment.

Let's see what happens, okay?

I'd say you want this fairly hot, you want them to go in

and immediately start to sizzle like that.

You could start a little bit lower and slower,

but I just wanna make sure,

like, we get the effect here, right?

We're, like, basically making

our own little, like, tortilla chips,

just particularly long ones and with this...

Like, these really lovely tortillas,

so I just wanna make sure that transformation happens.

I don't want them to just poach in the oil, you know,

and get kind of, like, oil-logged.

A little bit more neutral oil

for our chicken thighs right here.

[food sizzling]

Again, going into a fairly hot,

but not completely ripping non-stick skillet,

just wanna break this up

just so things kind of don't fuse together too much.

Chicken's rolling, just gonna leave that alone for a sec,

I'm gonna come back in a minute,

this tortilla situation went faster than expected.

I'm going to get the fried tortilla pieces off the heat.

Little pinch of salt on those

and we'll check them out again in another minute.

That's fun, though.

Just doing a quick little reheat on the tortillas,

open flame, you know, 20 seconds per side,

10 seconds, whatever, just, like, that flash of heat

really restores their vitality,

brings a little texture back.

[chicken clattering]

Okay, there we go.

[chicken clattering]

[tongs clanging]

We made it.

All right. Assembly time here.

Aioli, just for a little bit of extra sauciness

and a little bit of punchiness,

pushing the meat this hard flavor-wise and texture-wise

means you don't need a ton of it

in order to carry a lot of flavor in each taco.

Quick conversation about cheese.

Sometimes, if I'm at home

and I don't have, like, cheddar,

I don't have Cotija, a little bit of Parmesan

is remarkably welcome on a taco like this.

So this is our little, like, mini crunch wrap, okay?

I don't know if legally we can say that,

so I'll also just call it

our very good sort of carnitas-adjacent chicken taco.

Once I take a bite of this, I may not be able

to speak for five minutes, so just bear with me,

if I go quiet, everything's okay,

I'll just give you a little thumbs-up.

[relaxed rock music]

I gotta say, initially, I wasn't sure

that we needed the aioli, it's kind of amazing in there.

Also, the flavor of the crisp tortilla,

it's, like...

Turbo-charges just the natural kind of aroma

and kinda earthiness and that, like, corniness

present in the tortilla,

it's, like, corn on overdrive, it's really incredible,

so everything feels just, like, very amped up

and kinda cool, sort of showcases a lot of the ideas

we've been playing with all day today.

I honestly...

I love the challenge of this.

We showed that $30-ish worth of ingredients

can make not just a couple of plates of food,

can make enough of three different dishes

to feed four people,

so finding that path to be able to know

how to use these ingredients for yourself

and that anything can be used multiple ways,

it makes cooking affordably

sound a hell of a lot more interesting.

Okay.

All right, that's enough talking,

I'm gonna keep eating.

[upbeat funk music]

Mallory, you're gonna want these [censored] tacos,

here, you want one?

[upbeat funk music]

Get into that.

[upbeat funk music]