I love cooking. Raw meat, chicken germs . . . not so much.
I like to minimize the number of times I have to completely disinfect my sink after trimming raw chicken. The thought of chicken germs totally grosses me out. As does the thought of eating the fatty/cartilage/membrane stuff that is on the boneless skinless chicken breasts I buy. I know I’m a slob, but as I’ve said before, I’m a germaphobe as well. Go figure.
Anyway, I have chicken trimming down to an art form. I buy a large amount at one time and then I trim it all at once, cook up a bunch, and divide the rest into Ziploc bags. This way, when I make a chicken dish, I don’t actually have to touch it much or contaminate the sink at all. I can just obsess over the germs once instead of at every meal.
I used to feel guilty about the trimmings going to waste. I lived in Thailand for a few years and I know that there, the fat is the part many people like the best. It’s edible, but we just don’t like it. I also hated throwing the trimmings in the trash since chicken starts stinking so incredibly quickly.
So then I got the bright idea to cook up the trimmed-off chicken for our dog. She loves it! I know some people can’t give their dogs anything but dog food, but our dog has always been a leftovers eater.
The only problem is that cooking up all that fat and the bits of meat attached to it smells delicious! Way better than the boring old white meat we eat.
Here I’m cutting up chicken tenders for nuggets. Normally there’s a lot more scraps than this. I put the skillet at the sink so I can trim right over it.
Here they are, all cooked up. When I do a lot of chicken, we’ll usually divide it up and keep it in the fridge, giving her some every night for a while.
Works for me! See other works for me Wednesday posts at wearethatfamily.com.
This is so simply brilliant! Lucy (our yellow lab) thanks you!
I hate raw meat on my hands. It completely grosses me out. I found a box of disposable gloves at Costco and now one lives under the kitchen sink for times like these. I can do what I need to do and then remove the gloves and throw them away. It has really helped with the oogy factor.
Love the idea of the disposable gloves!
I’ve been using disposable rubber gloves (the box of 100 blue ones at Walmart for about $10.00) and 1000 food service gloves (2 boxes-500 each) I order from Amazon all the time. For years, I used to buy the food service ones at dollar stores, but they’re poor quality). But they come in handy for SO many things…polishing, litter boxes, dishes, cleaning toilets – and the area around them. Anything you would do that would require hand washing afterward…gloves help. They also reduce the need to invest in hand lotion companies. 🙂
Uh-oh. I give my dog the raw chicken scraps. Is that bad?
I also hate the smell of chicken scraps in the trash, but I don’t have a dog. I put them all in a plastic grocery bag, sometimes double or triple bagging, and freeze them until trash day. Sometimes I forget to get them into the trash, but when the freezer gets too crowded I usually remember. I don’t use those bags for anything else in the freezer so I don’t get mixed up and throw out the wrong things.
if you make your own broth save the scraps in a freezer bag in the freezer till you make broth, makes it taste better
Please don’t feed your dog cooked fat. It can cause pancreatitis. But by all means feed all the trimmings raw. My dogs eat raw meals every day-no kibble since the summer.