Meat is too expensive now — how do I still eat it?

Four moves, in the order the library’s pages would make them: buy it where a human cuts it, buy the cooked bird and use all of it, make a little go through a whole pot, and stop drying out the meat you did pay for.

Ask at the butcher counter. Skip the shrink-wrap: ask at the butcher counter is two people independently discovering the same thing: the counter with a human behind it is often the cheap option, not the fancy one. Local butchers and the meat counters at Hispanic groceries cut and portion to order at prices the big chains’ packaged case does not try to match, and you can ask for exactly what you want, two pounds split into four bags, a roast cut into stew meat. One walked in for tortillas and left with two weeks of chicken thighs and pork shoulder for less than four days’ usual spend. Both discoveries came with the same embarrassed laugh: the counter had been there all along. The companion trick: the morning after a holiday, when demand vanishes overnight, is when the meat case empties at the deepest markdowns of the year; portion, label, freeze, and check the receipt. Ask the person at the counter how they would cook the cheap cut, and you will usually get a better answer than a recipe site.

Buy the cooked bird and boil the bones. Buy the cooked bird and boil the bones starts at the hot counter where the whole cooked chicken costs about what the raw one does, and something about that feels like a trick. Five separate conversations there say it is priced at or near a loss to bring you through the door; the page carries the argument about whether the shop actually loses money and says it does not need it settled, because the bird is cheap for you either way. Six conversations say the bird is several meals: strip the meat into two or three before you eat the first, then put the carcass, skin and bones in a pot with water and vegetable ends for stock. Four say the shop marks unsold birds down late in the day or sells them chilled next morning for less. The storage clock, from the federal food-safety service: into the fridge within two hours of coming off the warmer, one hour if the room is over 90 °F, three to four days refrigerated. And the page says plainly who it is not for: in the United Kingdom one account says the cooked bird costs more than the raw one, so the test is the two prices side by side, not the country.

Make the meat a seasoning. Make the meat a seasoning comes from people who call themselves financial vegetarians, cheerfully. Shrink the meat to a flavouring and build the meal on beans, lentils, rice or potatoes; a modest amount carries its full flavour through a pot that feeds six, and chili, curry, stir-fry and ragù were built on exactly that. The pattern that kept failing was the all-or-nothing vow; the one that worked was a few meat-light dinners a week that nobody at the table particularly noticed. If you want meat fully on the menu with a smaller bill, that lane is equally respectable: cheaper cuts, whole birds, the sale-and-freeze rhythm.

Salt it the night before, and pat it dry. Salt the meat the night before is for the chicken that is dry again and the pork chop that never browned. Five separate conversations salt it out of the packet, pat it dry and leave it uncovered in the fridge until it is cooked; the surface dries so the skin crisps, and the meat keeps more of its water in the pan. A wet surface will not brown, so the pat-dry is not optional if you want a crust. Spoon spices in rather than shaking the jar over the heat, or steam turns the jar to a brick. Coarse kosher salt and fine table salt are not equal by the spoon; a recipe written for the first wants about half as much of the second.

Who this is not for. The salt page’s safety line: if you have high blood pressure, a kidney condition or heart disease, or eat low-sodium, a brine is added salt; count it inside the limit your clinician gave you, or take the drying and resting and leave the salt. And the cooked bird is heavily seasoned, so if salt is a medical matter for you, that page says the nutrition is a doctor’s question, not its own.