Chicken Soup
Remember the lovely roast chicken we made the other day? Well, now, it’s chicken soup.
Pick all of the chicken off the carcass (well most of it.) Did you know that when I was little, I would run screaming if I heard the word carcass? I think my parents did it when they wanted to talk about something I wasn’t supposed to hear, and I was beyond the age that they could just spell it out. “CARCASS CARCASS CARCASS!” and off I would go. It is a gross word. But it has lovely chicken bits on it…
Anyway, I digress. After you’ve picked the chicken mostly clean (and made sure to empty out the cavity which I stuffed with lemons which would probably make weird tasting soup) put it in a big stock pan with some carrots and celery, a quartered onion, and maybe a bay leaf or two. Cover with water, and let simmer (do not boil or it will be icky) for about 3 hours, longer if you have the time. Add some salt so it actually tastes like something. Skim the stuff off the top occasionally. Set aside and let cool, so you can get the chicken fat off the top, too. (And probably all the butter we added to it the other day.) My chicken dissolved in there and I had just a pile of bones and skin with a little bit of meat hanging around for giggles. I love my strainer, because it meant I didn’t have to do any work.
And this is where things got funny. I had never made chicken stock like this before, and I was alarmed at 1) how easy it really is (hello, cover a chicken in water and simmer until it tastes like soup) 2) how good the stock tasted and 3) how panicked you can get when food does things you don’t expect. Case and point: I put my lovely, steaming bowl of stock into the fridge, and expect it to come out again in the morning looking like, well, like chicken soup. But it has turned to aspic covered in fat. Ew? But I am assured that is actually a *good* thing, so off I went. First, I skimmed off the layer of fat that had accumulated on top of the “chicken jelly.” I dumped my aspicy soup blob into a saucepot, added a little water to thin it out, and as soon as it got hot again, it became soup once more.
Now, chicken soup is personal. I like mine to be very simple, so I’m going to add some finely chopped carrots, onions, and celery (about 1 cup of each) and let them hang out in the stock for a bit. (Once it’s simmering, about 15 minutes) Mine was seeming to not be salty enough, so at this point, I also added about 1/4 packet of “onion and mushroom” Lipton soup mix, which felt like cheating but tasted really good. Throw in your noodles and let them cook in the broth (egg noodles today) and add some of that shredded chicken back in that you picked off the bird earlier. Let it hang out in there for just a few minutes while you wait for the noodles to cook. Add some chopped parsley for pretty, if you like. All done!