Bye Bye Bouillon

Warning- if you are a vegetarian, you probably do not want to read on!

We eat a LOT of soup in the fall and winter time.  There is nothing I love more than a big pot of homemade soup and freshly baked bread on a cold winter night.  But it's August...so why am I craving soup so badly???  Maybe because of the awesome Homemade Chicken Stock I whipped up tonight in anticipation for all those great soup nights.  Our house smells incredible right now!  And yours can too....just follow these easy steps!

Homemade Chicken Stock

•  Roast a chicken.  We usually just stick a thawed whole chicken with a little butter and salt/pepper in a crock pot for the day or in the oven for a couple hours.  Easy peasy! 

• Pull all the chicken off the bones.  The thing I love about whole chickens is that for about $6, it's enough for a fabulous dinner for the four of us and then there's enough extra for us to pick off to use for another meal (like soup or a casserole).

• Stick all the leftover bones, skin, juice, etc. all in a pot.  Add enough cold water to just cover the carcass. Then add some celery, onions, carrots, garlic, etc.

After dumping it into the pot from the roasting pan...see I told you vegetarians to stop reading, this looks disgusting!  But it makes something soooooooo yummy!!!

•Bring just to boiling, then reduce to low and simmer for like 4 hours.  Skim the foamy stuff off whenever you feel like it.  The more you skim it, the less cloudy your broth will be. 

Oh my gosh does it smell FABULOUS!!!!

• Strain with a fine strainer, cool and freeze and you're done!  You can freeze in ice cube trays to add in a little at a time if you want, or in containers.  Ours boiled for awhile and a lot of the water boiled out making the stock more concentrated.  So when we use it for soup, we'll be adding more water back in.

Total from our one roasting chicken, we got about 8 cups of concentrated stock...so it should make about a gallon of broth when we add back in some of the water.

Look at how easy that is!  And talk about economical!  To buy this much canned broth would be way expensive and the only cost of this was probably less than $1 for the vegetables (and actually I wouldn't even count it in our case, because we never eat up a whole thing of celery before it goes bad and the carrots we pulled out and saved to go in the soup I'm making for tomorrow- yes we are having soup in August, so we would have used those anyways). 

I didn't skim very often, (because I watched a whole bunch of "Say Yes to the Dress" instead of monitoring it.)  But it tastes the same either way and we often make creamy soups, so it doesn't really matter how it looks.

I always thought making homemade chicken stock was way too hard and not worth it...but this stuff is just so much healthier and full of more nutrients than the little bouillon cubes and it really was hardly any work at all.  I've heard that it really helps fend off illness...so I can't wait to test that out this cold/flu season.  Next time you have roast chicken, give it a try!