Recipe for
Chicken Soup, A La Fluffy
1 whole chicken
1 oven
1 6 qt. pot
water
fresh vegetable stuff, and canned vegetable stuff
vegetable bouillon cube
white wine
rice or macaroni
plastic storage containers
2 days
1. Roast the chicken. I do this by impaling the chicken on the baking cone from my Wilton's "3-D" panda pan set. It's more fun this way, but to each his own.
2. Burn your fingers while removing the meat. Of course, you could wait until the chicken was cooled down. Wimp.
3. After removing the meat, put the carcass, skin,heart, gizzard, neck, collected juices and fat, and everything else you roasted (this does not include the styrofoam tray or the absorbent paper under the chicken, even if you did roast *them*) into the 6 qt. pot.
4. Add enough water to cover all that stuff in the pot. Cook that disgusting-looking mess to make stock. I let it go for several hours, and generally cook down the liquid level by half.
5. Strain the stock (forget the quality of mercy, it's not strained) into the plastic containers. Shuffle stuff around in your refrigerator to find room for the containers. Leave the bones in the now empty pot overnight, so they look REALLY gross the next morning.
6. Get up the next morning and read the note from your spouse asking that you not leave gross-looking stuff in the kitchen.
7. Scrape the fat off the top of the soup stock, and save some for sauting the vegetables.
8. Cut up lots of vegetable stuff: 2-3 carrots, ditto celery, and onions. Some garlic. Handful of fresh parsley, finely chopped. When no one is looking, melt the fat in the 6qt. pot (yes, throw out the gross-looking bones first, and maybe even wash the pot) and saute the vegetables until the onion is translucent. (Translucent: put a piece of onion on your monitor screen. If you can read this recipe through the onion, it's translucent.)
9. Add other stuff, maybe a 19 oz or greater can of crushed tomatoes. Add some white wine, or drink it yourself. Whatever. Cook that for five minutes. Add a can or two of drained beans. (Dried beans are used at Chez Rudolph for kidz art projects only.)
10. Add the chicken stock. It's usually gelatinized, and makes a wonderful mess if you pour it into the 6 qt. pot from at least 18 inches above the pot. The kids get off on this part.
11. Cook until the stock "melts" and the whole thing is stirable. Crush the bouillon cube, and throw it in. Get the soup hot (gentle simmer), and add rice or macaroni or whatever. I use about a cup of uncooked rice, stir it in, and cook for about 30 minutes until the rice is tender. It's usually at this point that your spouse wanders in, and says that he's changed his mind, he'd rather have potatoes in the soup.
12. Add pepper to taste, preferably to the soup. We ladle the soup into bowls, and add chopped chicken to the individual portions. (One of us is a vegetarian.) The soup invariably turns out like a stew, but I like to think of this as a Good Thing.
Suggested sandwich: sliced chicken and onion on toasted seedless rye with blue cheese salad dressing.
from And Another Thing © 1994, 1995 Cathy Faye Rudolph.
Contents © 1994, 1995 Wayward Fluffy Publications.