Chicken salad, enchiladas, tostadas, tetrazzini, chicken spaghetti, pot pie, taquitos, quesadillas. They all start with shredded chicken. When there’s a recipe sized bag ready to go in the freezer, the rest of the meal doesn’t seem so hard.
I bought frozen grilled chicken pieces from Aldi yesterday. My stress level had come to that. It was kind of gross and expensive. Not completely awful, but nothing like home marinated and grilled chicken. If your stress level makes frozen grilled chicken a necessity, no judgement here. But there is a simple way to have prepped chicken at home.
Fill your slow cooker up to 3/4 full with chicken breasts, then pour water into the spaces until it comes just even with the top of the chicken. Season with salt, pepper, celery seed, garlic powder, and onion powder. Slow cook for 4-5 hours. Remove chicken from the broth and let it cool until cool enough to handle.
Drop a breast or 2 (enough for your typical recipe) into a quart size freezer baggie, press out all the air and seal. Then mush it around with your fingers until it is all shredded up. Moosh the chicken flat, and freeze it. Simple, right?
You also have all that great chicken broth. If you use it up within the week, you can put it in a pitcher in your fridge. (We rarely have juice, so it’s safe at our house. If you often have lovely pitchers of stuff in your fridge, you should probably label it. Or hide around the corner with a video camera…..)
For those of you who need recipes. Here you go:
Easy Shredded Chicken for Your Freezer
Ingredients
- 2 lb chicken breasts
- 8 cups water
- 3 tsp salt
- 1 tsp black pepper
- 1 tsp onion powder
- 1 tsp garlic powder
- 1/2 tsp celery seed
Instructions
- Combine everything in a 5 quart slow cooker.
- Cook on high for 4-5 hours. (No need to thaw the chicken first.)
- Remove chicken from broth and cool until cool enough to handle.
- Place 2 small or 1 large chicken chicken breast into each freezer bag and shred by mooshing the outside of the bag with your fingers.
- Remove all the air and freeze flat.
3.1
http://www.groceryshrink.com/the-secret-to-easy-shredded-chicken-for-your-freezer/
P.S. For those of you who are wondering, most brands of freezer bags are BPA free. I specifically checked Ziploc brand and Up and Up brands, but several others are safe too.
Cake mix is a convenience food I buy, especially when it goes on sale. The delicious and effective chemicals in them give results I haven’t been able to duplicate by scratch. I’m sure it’s because I’m impatient and don’t separate eggs, or combine dry and wet ingredients separately.
