Chinese Food: inexpensive, nutritious, delicious... and fun!

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There's several ways to package drumsticks and thighs. You can bone out both pieces and freeze them together, you can bone out either and add to a half-breast package or you can freeze them separately or together unboned. There are satisfying CF recipes for each combination.

Boning out drumsticks and thighs is a rather tedious task and the result (unlike boned chicken breast) is not always pretty. This is important when it comes to thin-slicing (1/8" or less) chicken for Chinese dishes that rely heavily on eye appeal. Consequently, I've come to prefer leaving these parts whole and using them in recipes that call for unboned thighs and drumsticks.

I save chicken wings until I have four or five pair, then outrageously squander them all on one or another tasty Chinese dish designed just for those otherwise seldom-eaten parts of the bird. (There has been some concern recently about concentrations of harmful drugs in the wings of nororganically-raised chickens. Certainly there should be no problem if you can raise your own or purchase your birds from sources that let their chickens mature naturally in the weed, and gravel instead of a wire cage.)

Chicken backs are harder to deal with. Sometimes I just bone them out as well as possible and add the few pieces of meat to any of the other packages. I suppose one could save the backs for homemade soup stock which is much bette than either bouillon or canned stock (but tedious to make; Then again, there are good CF recipes which call for chicken backs, gizzards, livers and hearts. If all else fails the back, organs and innards of a chicken make excellent catfish bait. There's no need to waste a thing.

I cut the beef and pork into individual portions (about four to five ounces) and bag and freeze each one. There are many commercially-available freezer wrapping products but I prefer two plastic baggies—one inside the other—for the job. The bags are relatively inexpensive, extremely convenient and provide excellent protection against freezer burn. I'm reluctant to recommend the bags without some qualifications, however, since thoughtless use of such products can easily turn into unsound ecological practice. In my case, I remove the still-frozen portions of meat from the bags, turn the baggies inside out, wash, dry and reuse them over and over again. The bags—so used—should not contribute needlessly to our throw-away pollution problems.

It's essential that all fat be trimmed from the chicken, beef and pork (only lean meat is used in CF cooking) and it's usually easiest to pare this waste away when cutting the meat into individual portions for the freezer. Heavy layers of fat provide the major exception to this rule . . . such fat is best extracted when the meat is thin-sliced for cooking. Incidentally, meats are most easily thin-sliced while still partially frozen.

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