When I was a kid and teenager, we raised chickens for eggs. We kept about 25 hens at any given time and averaged a dozen and a half eggs a day. But inevitably, a hen would slow down and stop laying eggs. If I had to guess, I would say we got three good years of egg-laying from a hen. So what do you do then? Do you keep feeding them and wait until they just die? No, you don't; for a couple reasons. First, it was a waste of money to feed a non-producing hen. Second, as they aged, the stronger, more dominant, younger birds would start picking on the old bird. There really is such a thing as a "pecking order" in a chicken yard. The younger hens will prevent the weak ones from eating and they will peck at and harass the weaker birds until they die a miserable death. So we would cull them out, give them a merciful and humane death, and then dress them out to eat.
So now we had a three to five pound chicken to eat. But what you had to understand was these were free-range chickens that roamed a large barnyard and worked hard for their own food, supplemented by cracked corn and kitchen scraps. So by the time they were non-productive at three to five years old, they were pretty tough. My mom and dad liked southern fried chicken and even though these were tough old birds, my mom would bread them and fry them in a cast iron pan! Ugh, they were horrible. It was like eating a chicken-flavored car tire. What we should have been doing was cooking them down in a pot of stock to be used in soups, stews, and pot pies.
We also didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up so when my mom bought beef, it was usually very cheap cuts. Now we beef, she understood what to do. Tough cuts of beef were diced up for soup, cubed for stew, ground up for hamburger, or slow cooked in a crock pot as a pot roast.
The general rule for cooking tough, cheaper cuts of meat is to cook it for a long time at a low temperature. Crock pots are probably the easiest way to do this. You can prepare the meat and vegetables in the morning, let it cook all day, and enjoy a tender, nutritious meal at the end of your work day. Roasts, soups, and stews can all be cooked this way and as long as you eat everything in the pot, you gain the maximum nutritional value from the ingredients that you used.
Countertop convection ovens are another good method. When I lived in The Netherlands I bought my first convection oven to slow cook meats while I was involved in one of my many hobbies. The advantage of these types of ovens is that they have up to two hour timers and you can set the temperature as low as 185 degrees. I would take a small roast, rub it down with A1 Sauce and then coat it with spices (Greek Seasoning was my favorite), and then sear it in a hot pan to seal the outside of the meat. Once that was done, I put the meat in a casserole dish type roasting pan with a grate on the bottom to keep the meat off the bottom of the pan. This prevented the meat from boiling. I set the temp at 185 degrees and set the timer to two hours and then went off to do other stuff. When the two hours was done, I rotated the meat, top to bottom, and set the timer for another 60 minutes. After the third hour I took the meat out so it could "rest" for fifteen minutes while I prepared the side dishes. The meat would be medium rare to medium, moist and tender. And this was crap cuts of meat from the military commissary.
Outdoor smokers are another good choice, if you have one. BBQ was invented to take tough cuts of cheap meat, that the rich folks wouldn't eat, and make them edible. My son gave me a small smoker a couple years ago and it is a true wonder. It takes some knowledge and skill but you can take rough cuts of meat and transform them into very delicious treats. The secret again is that the meat is cooked for a long time at low temperatures which allows the meat fibers to break down and flavors from the sauce, herbs, and spices to permeate the meat. Everyone loves a good rack of ribs, right? Intercostal muscles, the meat between ribs, is TOUGH. But through low heat, long duration cooking, it becomes tender, delicious ribs.
LEARN TO COOK: Research and learn new ways to prepare meats, starches, and vegetables to take advantage of and use the cheapest ingredients you can buy (when your situation requires this). People around the world that have less than you do have been surviving this way for hundreds of years.
