Wake up and smell the chicken stock

Hey guys!

Last night MKBBF and I did our normal Sunday routine. I did something a bit different though. I realized putting shredded chicken on my salad at the Salad Bar at Whole Foods was idiotic. Because the salad bar is $7.99 a pound. Under no circumstances should chicken ever cost that much. This thought was accentuted by the fact that Harry's has precooked NAKED (ie no added salt or garbage) rotisserie chicken on sale on Sundays for $5.99. So I picked one up yesterday afternoon, and took it completely apart to make 3 piles: a stock pile, a red meat pile, and a white meat pile. Literally nothing goes to waste when I buy a whole chicken. Nothing. Those creepy little ooeys and gooeys are what make chicken stock taste like . . . chicken. The red meat I'll use in breakfast scrambles, the white meat I took down to Buckhead and added to the dinner we ate at Whole Foods, and everything else went in the crock pot.

I used to make stock in a stock pot on the stove, but I've found it's so much easier to do it in a crock pot and leave it on high over night. All I do is dump in the chicken parts, half an onion, 3 carrots and 4 big celery stalks. The veggies are chopped very roughly - why this is important will make more sense in a second. Anyhow, after letting the stock do its thing for 12-14 hours, I strain it. Then I pull the celery and carrot chunks out of the strainer and add back to the stock - much more difficult to extricate veggies from chicken parts when they're tiny. Then I Vita-Mix it all together and strain it again (just in case). It makes a TON of stock. In the neighborhood of 3-4 quarts just from one 6 dollar chicken. That would cost 9-12 dollars if I bought it packaged - and the packaged stuff always has some sort of weird ingredient like "natural chicken flavor". I mean, what the hell IS that exactly . . .?! Moral of the story: I save money just on the stock, it tastes SO much better, and I still have an entire chicken worth of meat on top of it!

So I'll be incorporating this into the Sunday routine, for obvious reasons. Which means that on Mondays I'll be waking up to the delicious wholesome smell of chicken stock cooking like I did today. WIN!

Anyway, today's workout looks pretty grueling - so I'm not going to back to back BodyRock it like I did yesterday. Don't get me wrong - I'm not doing one BodyRock workout and calling it quits, either. You know me better than that!

Workout of the Day:
Set Fire Workout
20 rounds of 10 seconds rest 20 seconds work rope skipping
8 minute abs
20 rounds of 10 seconds rest 20 seconds work rope skipping

Total time: 44 minutes

ROCK!

*******UPDATE*******
This workout. Was . Brutal. I changed up the skipping a bit and my rope broke in the middle so then I had to do high knees and jumping jacks instead.

I did 16 rounds of 10 seconds rest 20 seconds work skipping, then did the Set Fire Workout, then 24 rounds of 10 seconds rest 20 seconds work skipping - somewhere around round 12 in this second block of rounds my rope broke, so I alternated high knees and jumping jacks for the remainder.

Scores for Set Fire Workout (Zuzie totals in parentheses):

Mountain Jump Lunge 6/6/6/5.5 = 23.5 (23)
Sliding Push Ups 10/10/10/10 = 40 (30)
Mountain Jump Lunge 5.5/5.5/6/6 = 23 (21)
Crunch Scissors 19/20/21/20 = 80 (52)
Mountain Jump Lunge 5.5/6/6/6 = 23.5 (23)
Reverse Push Up & Knee Tuck 12/12/13/13 = 50 (44)

Well, boys and girls - looks like I beat Zuzu on this fine day! Of course, I do have an advantage by knowing her reps ahead of time so I have goals to shoot for :). However, the Lights (surname of Zuzie and Freddy), not to be outdone as a unit, beat me. How so? Because Freddy's scores blew mine out of the water. So I'll be gunning after him tomorrow!