Bella and I came back from our walk this morning to find Dom had cleaned the microwave and was in the midst of cleaning out the refrigerator. He’d located the source of the really foul odor: bad cheese. What a wonderful husband!
Of course, he then proceeded to give Bella his birthday card to play with. The one that plays the Chicken Dance over and over again. So that was our lunchtime entertainment. But, hey it amused the toddler and led me to discover on Wikipedia that the Chicken Dance was written by a Swiss accordionist in the 1950’s. Bet you didn’t know that! (And now I hope at least one of you out there will have that annoying oompah stuck in your head. Misery loves company.)
Would you mind explaining more about how you make big batches of chicken stock and then freeze them? I am the only one in my family who likes soup when I am sick but by the time I get sick, I don’t feel like making it. Thanks!
Since all I have to do with the stock-making process is using the final product, I’ll turn the explanations over to my dear husband. Here are a couple of posts Dom did on our cooking blog about making stock: the recipe, and a recent explanatory blog post with pictures of a recent batch.
Oh I guess I do help with part of the process: I save the chicken bones. We buy whole chickens and roast them fairly frequently, at least once every couple of weeks. Whole chickens are so much more economical than chicken parts, especially if you save the bones and use them for stock.
One smallish chicken gives our little family of three several meals: 1. a nice roast chicken dinner (a good Sunday favorite), 2. a spicy enchilada night, 3. leftover enchiladas for lunches or leftover night, 4. leftover enchilada filling (our recipe usually makes too much filling for some reason) makes really nice chicken quesadillas.
We save and freeze all the bones from the roast chicken, plus bones from any other bone-in chicken dishes we make. (Even hot wings from Sunday afternoon football! A recent experiment showed that you can’t taste the buffalo sauce in the resulting stock, it’s too diluted.) Since you’re going to boil the heck out of the bones anyway while making the stock, it doesn’t matter if they’ve been gnawed on a bit, the boiling will kill all the germs.