Simple Chicken Stock
(Which is the backbone of any good soup!)
Roasted Chicken Carcass
Big Stock pot
Put the chicken carcass in the pot. Put the pot on the stove. From your freezer, take out the ziplock bag where you’ve been stockpiling these ‘scraps:’
Carrot peelings
Onion tops & bottoms & paper skins (They make the stock brown.)
Celery trimmings
Add a goodly amount of your ‘scraps to the pot and throw in a few cloves of garlic if you have them on hand (paper and all), or a Tbsp. of chopped garlic from a jar if you’re ‘lazy’ like me. Cover the pot contents with water. Bring to a boil, poking and stirring it from time to time. Reduce heat and simmer down until it’s nice and ‘rich’ looking, about another 30-45 minutes.
Let it cool down a bit. Pour it through a colander into a big bowl. Take the carcass and spent veggies and put them in the Chicken Scrap Bucket under the sink. (What? You don’t have a Chicken Scrap Bucket under your sink? Then toss it on the compost heap, bones and all, or give it to the dog on his kibble, but NOT the bones, of course!)
I then divide this into 2 cup portions, which I freeze in large yogurt tubs, or large cottage cheese tubs, etc. Label and freeze. If it doesn’t come out to exactly 2-cup portions, put it back into the big bowl and add some water so each portion is 2 cups. You can always tinker with it later when you’re making soup. This usually makes 6 cups of stock, sometimes a little more if I really fill that stock pot up with water!
FWIW, roasting a whole chicken is usually MUCH less expensive than buying chicken ‘parts’ even when you buy a whole roaster from the local Amish guy, or at a reputable meat market. And if you’re good about it, you can get any number of meals from a whole chicken. I can usually get three meals, plus the fixin’s for the chicken stock, easy.
(You can do this with a turkey carcass too, but you need a VERY large stock pot to accommodate ‘Tom.’ LOL!)
ROFL!!!!!!!!!
In the rearranging after the remodeling of the kitchen in the Church it seems that the stockpots all disappeared.....Apparently I was the only one with reasonable size stockpots for our soup and sandwich Wednesday night Advent study group. Amazingly they decided they only needed my 20quart pot, not the 33 quart pot, and then regretted not asking to use the 12 quart pot ---- snicker!
I use the left over roast chicken for soup too. I also have used it to make chicken & dumplings. If I cut up something like an onion & have too much I also freeze it. Many times I’ve run out of fresh onions & that little baggie of onions has saved the dinner.
I would be careful of carrot peelings in stocks. The carrot, like most roots tend to rot from the outside in. The peelings you would get from most supermarket carrots are already pretty old (unless you buy the carrots with the tassel still on them) and could easily sour the vegetable flavor of your stock.