Easy Homemade Chicken Soup or Chicken n' Dumplings

Photo**

This chicken soup is so easy, I’m going to list all of the measurments in metric, just so you feel like you’ve done something special.

Ingredients

- 1 Whole Deli-roasted Chicken from the grocery store (day-old is good, if the price is marked down) NOTE 1: Roasted chicken, not fried. NOTE 2: Turns out, counting chickens is the same whether in imperial or metric systems. Go figure.

- 2 Liters Water

- Noodles, pasta or dumplings of your choice, amount by personal preference (I like a lot.) Try angel hair pasta broken into 2 cm pieces.

- (Optional) Mirepoix (chopped onion, celery and carrots)  As much or as little as you want, for both color and flavor. NOTE: Mirepoix (MEER-pwah) is the fancy-schmancy French cuisine name for this basic flavor combo, traditionally, two parts onions, one part carrots, and one part celery.

Preparation

- Drop the chicken in a large pot. (Add mirepoix)

- Cover with water (use more water as necessary).

- Bring to a boil and then simmer one hour, covered.

Kroger's roast chicken.

- Remove chicken and taste the broth, add salt, pepper or spices to taste. NOTE: Usually these deli-roasted birds are so heavily salted and spiced that no further seasoning is needed. If you think it needs more spice, try adding some poultry seasoning.

- Bring the broth to a boil and add your pasta, noodles or dumplings, cook according to their directions.

- While the noodles are cooking, carefully (it’ll be HOT) break apart the chicken and pull the meat into bite-sized chunks. Use two forks if the chicken’s too hot to touch.

- Add the meat back to the broth.

- Serve

Variations

Chicken and dumplings**

Chicken Vegetable Soup
- Add some mixed frozen or canned veggies to the broth with the noodles.
Chicken and Dumplings
- Including mirepoix and/or other vegetables, especially carrots and onions, is common.
- Stir in a little roux (you can always add more) to thicken the finished broth. (Presto! Broth becomes stew.)
- Cut refrigerator biscuits into bite-sized pieces, drop on top of simmering stew.
- Cover and simmer about 20-25 minutes.
- Pull the chicken into chunks, add back to finished stew.

;^)

Roux

A roux (roo) is a basic thickener for soups, stews, gravies and sauces.

A roux-based sauce.**

Ingredients

Equal parts, by weight (you can estimate)

- Flour

- Fat (butter, margarine, vegetable oil, animal fat, e.g., bacon grease or lard)

Preparation

- Heat the fat over medium-low until it is a liquid. If you’re using butter, cook it slowly until the bubbling stops.

- Stir in the flour, blending until smooth.

- Continue stirring over medium heat until the raw flour taste is gone, usually 3-5 minutes.

- The longer you cook a roux the darker it gets, imparting more color and flavor to the intended dish. Sometimes you want a roux to be white, sometimes darker.

- Add to intended sauce, soup, stew, gravy, stirring briskly into the dish to avoid lumps, then bring the whatever to a high simmer until thickening occurs, usually just a minute or two. It’s best to use a whisk and not to add to a very hot item. The more you add, the thicker it gets; best to start with just a little

A sure sign of a profes-

sional cook: the ability to
hold hot objects, bare-

handed, with impunity.

Variations

- Cowboy roux (also called a white wash) Blend equal parts flour and water, add as above. Since the flour is raw going into the final dish, it must be cooked longer than when adding a standard roux, usually at least five minutes. Taste test to be sure.

- Cornstarch (corn flour), used in lesser amounts when mixed with water, blends easier, doesn’t have a raw flour taste to worry about, and can impart a bit of shine to the finished product.

;^)

Eureka!

Uh, hot cocoa, anyone?

It's a, uh...uh, a Cajun

recipe I found on the net— 

Chocolat au Lait Carbonisé

—Blackened Cocoa!

Cooking, like other arts, occasionally depends on luck. Sometimes a screw-up will turn out to be an improvement, like my discovery that more butter and less milk makes mashed potatoes even better. Recently, trying to approximate the recipe at a local restaurant, I ended up with a meat loaf that turned out way too highly spiced. So I broke it into chunks and used it to make a spaghetti meat sauce—where it was just perfect. For that matter, it was much easier than making meat balls, and I may just use that method again.

There are two basic rules to dealing with cooking mistakes when presenting food to family, guests or customers:

1. Take full credit whenever anything turns out good, even if you screwed up. You simply say, "Thank-you. I had a feeling that it would be good this way."

2. When things turn out bad, blame the recipe. For instance, you can say "That is pretty bad, isn't it? I got this recipe variation on line; it was supposed to add a flavor layer, but not like this. Let's chalk it up to scientific research; that's one formula we know doesn't work. More wine?"

Trust me, all professional chefs know these two rules and follow

them assiduously. Chefs do not make cooking errors—it's just a

given. Cooking is a tough job, cooking well is even tougher. You need to give yourself a break whenever the opportunity comes up. Besides, it's an art, and art has always depended on luck. I don't reckon that prehistoric cave painter, when he was mixing pigments, was thinking, "I'll bet this hand print will still look good 10,000 years from now."

So, when it comes out great, you're an artist; when it fails miserably, you're a scientist. It will give your guests confidence and allow you to learn from your mistakes in peace.

This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook — try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun! Julia Child, My Life in France

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

;^)

Bowl me over

So, the other day I was sitting outside my rig, staring at the mountains and I’d let my mind off its leash. The old gray mass was wandering around, listening to the wind, looking at cloud shapes, sniffing the fresh air—when all of a sudden it whirls around and rushes back to me with this question:

Why do we serve pancakes on a plate?

Then you spend the entire meal chasing down errant syrup with the pancake bits you’ve impaled on your fork. Even expending all that effort, there’re still puddles of pancake syrup scattered about the plate when all the pancakes are gone.

Now I’m sure you, like I, learned in high school physics that pancakes and waffles posses the requisite properties allowing them to soak up all but the most over-thickened, bland-tasting, maple syrup substitutes. And I’m sure you, like I, have carried out the experiments proving these properties, taking note of how the bottom-most pancake absorbs the sucrose or fructose suspensions (i.e., syrup) with which it may come in contact.

How best, I wondered, to take advantage of these properties?

Eureka! I thought, serve pancakes in a bowl!

Concentrate the syrup to the center. Then, when you cut down through a stack and lift a section past your lips, you’ll be transferring saturation-point layers fully laden with maximum syrupy succulence.

I tried this out, using fried shredded wheat (Yes, Fried Shredded Wheat.) as my test medium. Works perfectly.

;^)

Fried Shredded Wheat

Recipe: Prepare shredded wheat as you would French toast. Then eat it like French toast.

Large biscuit shredded wheat,
un-fried.

This was one of my favorites growing up. But I think only my Mom and I really liked it, so we didn’t have it that often. I found the nutty taste, the crunchy texture and a near-mushy interior to be an excellent vehicle for slurps and slurps of table syrup.

That was back in the day before spoon-size mini-wheats. And bite-size mini-wheats. And frosted mini-wheats. Back then, there was just one size of shredded wheat biscuit: large. One cereal company made them into oblong pillows, another into round pods. Either way, maximum occupancy by a large cereal bowl was two biscuits.

Those large biscuits still work best for this recipe, however, any size or type of shredded wheat will work. There are just two things to keep in mind:

1. The smaller the biscuit, the longer it must soak in the egg-milk mix.
2. Frosted biscuits will burn sooner because of the sugar surfaces.

Oh, one more thing. The big, old-fashioned biscuits were manufactured without any ingredients other than wheat. That means no salt. So check your brand’s ingredient list. If there’s no salt (“sodium” on the nutrition label) listed, adding some to the egg batter may improve the taste, depending on your own salt habits.

;^)