PSA: Watching a line cook at a diner in El Paso stretch a $7 chicken into 4 meals taught me more than any budget app

Barbara Ramirez · 2026-09-22T11:10:03.771762+00:00

I was sitting at the counter at this little diner off Montana Ave in El Paso about 2 months ago, just killing time before a shift, and the cook was breaking down a rotisserie chicken right in front of me. She took every bit of meat off, then threw the whole carcass in a pot with some onion and a carrot and let it go, and I swear she got like 6 cups of stock out of what I would have tossed in the trash. Then she took the meat and made a chicken salad, a soup, and some tacos over the next two days. I asked her about it and she said her grocery bill for her and her kid is like $60 a week because she never buys anything without a plan for the scraps. I went home and started doing the same thing with the $5 rotisserie chickens from the store and my food spending went from around $90 a week down to like $55. The big thing I learned was that I was never really meal prepping, I was just buying ingredients and hoping. Does anyone else have a specific trick from watching someone else cook that stuck with them? I'm trying to build up a list of stuff like this.

🐿️Pinecone Attack

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PSA: Watching a line cook at a diner in El Paso stretch a $7 chicken into 4 meals taught me more than any budget app | Budget Friendly Meals - Pinecone Attack