My family all eat free range chickens and eggs, so when they cook chicken they give me the carcass so I can then make a soup or casarole and invite them round to share I always make lots so they have take home aswell. I also get the egg shells, we have a composs bin so with all the organic veg we eat I think it gonna be good stuff

cookinlovebird

[/b]Unfortunately for us we are still going to buy the cheap chicken for now until they are totally fazed out we seen in our local tesco that they charge £7 for a free range, because of the size of our family we have to cook 2 whole chickens to get a good serving as our two oldest are in there teens and eat everything going.[/b]

Why not just stop eating so much chicken, save up and treat yourself to the occasional free range?

If more people ate more free range, it would become cheaper.

Simple supply and demand logistics.

I'm pleased people are starting to remember that there is the Freedom Food option between the sub-standard and unacceptable standard birds and the more expensive free-range ones.  I'm also pleased to see people sharing their ideas for getting more out of the chicken that they buy (more of that in a mo!)

The only issue I had with Hugh's programme was that he didn't really present the Freedom Food labels as viable options.  Perhaps any comments he made about them were edited out, but for people worried about their budgets it's no wonder that pushing free-range exclusively puts some of them off.

I live in Jersey and we are limited as to what is available to us, but we do have M&S and the Co-Op.  I now buy the Co-Op Elmwood RSPCA approved chickens.  I also note that the Co-Op have changed the labelling for their standard chickens, just as they said they would on Hugh's Chicken run (because it was misleading).  Unfortunately only whole chickens are available under the Elmwood label.  Does that mean I resort to the standard breast/leg portions?

Nope!  I have invested in a good boning knife (it cost under a tenner for a good quality one - James Martin's) and I bought two Elmwood whole chickens today for around £3.50 each.  In less than 20 minutes I'd jointed my chickens to give me 4 breasts (3 went into chicken korma tonight, one left over for a pie tomorrow), 4 leg/thigh joints for the freezer (or 8 joints if I separate them down into separate legs and thighs), 4 wings - also for the freezer, will add to them everytime I do this til I have enough wings for a meal! - and two carcasses from which I made a fantastic stock (probably 4 or 5 pints of it) and picked off enough meat off of the carcass to go with the one chicken breast set aside for my pie to make a pie big enough for 4 hungry mouths (or I could use it for sarnies or a salad).

So that's 3 "proper" meals at least, or even 4 if I separate the legs and thighs into 8 joints instead of the 4 combined joints I took off the chickens, not to mention stock which I've used for chicken korma/pilau rice tonight, which will go into the base for my pie tomorrow and still more for the freezer for future risottos etc.

It's nonsense that people have to keep buying standard birds.  The difference in cost is negligable to trade up to the Freedom Food labels.  I'm on a fairly tight budget and look how much I got out of fresh chicken totalling less than £7 - not much more than the 2 for £5 standard birds but infinitely more tender, flavourful and much less sinewy and tough than the cheaper birds.

I just made something similar for lunch for my family.

We had a pile of chicken wings left in the fridge from a BBQ yesterday, so I picked all the yummy smokey meat off them, also had a few spoons of sundried tomato pesto left that I made a few weeks back, and approx 1/3 cup cream. Mixed all this together & then mixed it through some penne. Yummy!

I watched the chicken and egg programme twice!! I needed to really take it all in and it changed my buying habits.

Since then, I have bought only free range birds and eggs and my conscience feels much better for it - plus they taste better!!

I considered keeping my own birds but my wife was against it (for practical reasons) but I think that where there is a will, there is a way. I still would like to do this, maybe one day......