Buying chicken in portions is really not a very economically sensible thing to do. A whole chicken costs considerably less than two breasts, two legs, two drumsticks, two wings and a bucketload of top-quality stock. The bird we bought yesterday was a Waitrose non-organic free-ranger costing £8.
If you're using a butcher, he will be perfectly happy to joint a chicken for you at no extra charge. Our butcher often offers two for a tenner and I tend to keep one whole for roasting and ask him to joint the other for the freezer.
If you're limited to a supermarket, jointing a chicken isn't that hard. I can manage it even with my rubbish knife skills, but I'm certainly not good enough to think about offering a tutorial so I'll point you in the direction of Gordon Ramsay instead.
The other option is to cook your bird whole. There's no need to miss out on a roast dinner just because you're only one or two people, and I've often made a roast just for my girlfriend and me. With the hot weather though, we decided on a chicken salad for dinner and cold chicken for our lunches as the week rolled on.
Cooking this way is simplicity itself - just the thing for a hot day. Just wash the chicken under a cold tap, inside and out, season with salt, pepper and tarragon, rub olive oil over it and dump it in the slow cooker with a few knobs of butter. Cooking with the slow cooker has the added advantage of not heating the flat up at all!
Start it off on High, then turn it down to Low after an hour. After another two hours (three in total) you will have a perfectly cooked, moist, tender chicken. If you start getting into slow cooking chicken as much as I have you should really get a meat thermometer (available for a fiver in kitchen shops). To comply with safety guidelines chicken should cook at 75C at the thickest part of the meat, but Heston says 60C is OK and he should know.
The only thing missing from your perfectly cooked chicken now is crispy skin. If you want it, put your chicken under the grill if it fits, or in the oven at 220C for about 10 minutes until the skin looks good. You may have to rotate your roasting tray in the oven, mine doesn't heat up evenly so I have to turn the tray around half way through! Fan ovens might do better. Skip this step if you don't intend to eat the skin, just peel it off.
Let the cooked chicken rest for a bit, then you can set about getting the meat off it. On this occasion I put the legs in tupperwares for lunches later, carved the breasts, ate the oysters (chef's privilege) and pulled the meat off the wings by hand.
Dinner was chicken salad, using some of the breast meat and all of the wing meat. Bit of lettuce, some cherry tomatoes and chopped up cucumber. Croutons made by chopping a couple of slices of white sliced (from the freezer) into squares, drizzling with olive oil and cooking in the oven at 190C for five minutes on each side - keep an eye on them or they will burn!
Caesar dressing was, I'm afraid, from the supermarket.
This salad fed us both well, the cat had some, my girlfriend had some chicken salad for lunch today, I made enough pasta-and-pesto with chicken to have today and tomorrow, and this evening I made a curry with what was left. Oh - and I made loads of stock from the carcass, which will enliven risottos for the foreseeable.
What a lot of meals from one £8 bird!
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