Whole Chicken Carcasses = Homemade Chicken Stock

In addition to belonging to a CSA through Waterpenny Farm, we buy our meat through  PolyFace, a farm that raises animals using sustainable farming practices.  It is quite an adventure to get our meat every three weeks and create enough freezer space to be able to hold everything, but I'll save that story for another day.  

When you buy PolyFace chicken, you get a whole chicken because they don't butcher it into breasts, thighs and legs.  We get to do that (or rather my husband does because I am absolutely terrible at it).  So what we do is usually defrost a whole chicken when we want to use the meat for dinner, cut it into pieces, cook what we need, store the rest and then we are left with the chicken cavity.  I started to find these chicken cavity carcasses back in my freezer, wrapped in foil.  I guess my "at home butcher" wanted to reuse these and was relying on me to figure it out.  So I did.  Whole Chicken Carcasses = Homemade Chicken Stock.

Now I make homemade chicken stock once every month or so.  It is relatively easy to make but it does take a while *and* it sort of makes your whole house stink like chicken broth.  Oh well, not everything can be glamorous.  Here's how you do it:

 1) Defrost your chicken cavity (or chicken pieces if you have leftovers you don't want to use to cook with, but definitely use pieces with bones!) and throw it in a big pot.  I usually use 4-5 chicken carcasses.  Add water to fill the pot almost to the top.

Raw chicken, neck and all but no giblets

  2) Bring the water with the chicken carcasses to a boil, skimming off the clotted blood (which is foamy and disgusting).

3) Once the water reaches a full boil, lower the heat immediately to a simmer (so that little bubbles are just breaking the surface).  

4) Add some vegetables to flavor the broth.  I usually use whatever I have on hand, so for this batch, I used some onions, zucchini, squash, and thyme.  Just use 5 or so pieces.  Don't use tomatoes though!

Vegetables in the broth adds more flavor

5) Simmer the chicken stock with the vegetables for 5-6 hours.  The aroma of chicken will fill your house - so much so, that you won't need to buy Yankee Candles as you have created your own aroma - Chicken Soup.  You can thank me later.

What's that perfume you are wearing?  Oh, that?  That's Eau de Chic

 6) Let the stock cool, remove the larger chicken pieces, and skim the fat off the top if you want.  This is the part that makes my dog come down to the kitchen and wait near the stove for me to miss the trash can.  I do every time - special treat for Webster!  Be careful of those bones though, dogs can't have chicken bones. 

7) Strain the chicken broth to remove vegetables and small chicken pieces.  I use a regular pasta strainer.

Lookin' good

 8) Now for the part that is a straight up pain.  I pour the chicken broth into little baggies and freeze.  I use to use big gallon bags, but I don't need that much chicken broth for my recipes so now I use the little bags.  You can lay them on a cookie sheet to keep them flat and once they are frozen, they are easy to store up right.

Baggies make it easy to store and use in recipes

And that's it!  Now you have your own, homemade chicken broth to use in recipes and you got rid of all those chicken carcasses wrapped in aluminum foil in your freezer.  Oh wait, I probably was the only one with that problem...  well anyway, now you can make some homemade soup with your chicken stock!
 

Tomato, Tamato

Our family belongs to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and for the most part, it's great.  We get lots of fresh veggies and we support a local farmer -- Waterpenny Farm in Sperryville, VA.  It's a win/win and you feel like a good little environmental steward.  However, there is the occasional problem around 'what in the hell am I going to do with this many (fill in veggie of choice here)?!?'  Because with a CSA, you get what is in season and right now, tomatoes are in peak season.  We get at least 6 to 10 tomatoes each week of a different variety - red, round hybrid, pink heirlooms and yellow hybrids.  It's A LOT of tomatoes to work with.  And coming from me, that's a pretty bold statement since I grew up "Jersey Fresh" and could eat tomatoes sprinkled with salt as a snack every day.    

Needless to say, I've got a lot of tomatoes that I need to do something with, so I decided to make gazpacho.  Initially, I was not a fan of gazpacho from a purely theoretical stand point. Gazpacho is a cold soup and in my mind, soup is a item meant to be served hot (unless you are homeless and are eating out of can, then you take what you can get).  But I abandoned my theoretical construct and embraced gazpacho in order to avoid rotten tomatoes.   

For my first try (since I am a gazpacho virgin), I got my recipe from a blogger my friend recommended, The Pioneer Woman.  I chose this recipe because it used a bunch of other veggies I had sitting around from my CSA share (zucchini, cucumber, garlic) -- two for one on that, choice is made!     

The recipe is super easy, basically chopping up veggies, pureeing a bunch of them with tomato juice, mixing the chopped veggies with the pureed ones, and viola! Gazpacho.  A few things to note that I found I had to adjust based on my preferences:

• My gazpacho came out a little too chunky in the end for my tastes, so I added more tomato juice and did a little more pureeing to adjust the veggie chunk to soup ratio
• Gazpacho is best served chilled (in my opinion) and to get it COLD, I throw my bowl in the freezer before I eat it.  Then it tastes refreshing on a hot summer day.

Overall, the gazpacho was delicious, proving that soup doesn't have to be hot (are homeless people on to something here?  hmmm.....) and like revenge, might be a dish best served cold.  Thanks Pioneer Woman for a super simple, and fantastic, recipe!  I will definitely eat what's on my plate.  And I guess what's on my husband's plate too since he claims to not want to eat 'salsa in soup form.'  Whatever, more for me!