Cook Much?

I like home cooking. It's fun, cheaper, and more nutritious than processed foods out there.  Here are a few things I've made recently.  First, I roasted this little chicken (less than $4 at Walmart, thank you very much!  I love and hate Walmart at the same time) using this recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/simple-whole-roasted-chicken/detail.aspx.  We ate the meat off the chicken over two nights with roasted potatoes.

The potatoes are the easiest thing in the world to make--heat up some olive oil in a pan, chop up a few potatoes, toss them in the pan with some Tony's seasoning, turn them every few minutes until they're nice and browned, and voila! Easy peasy potatoes, which are surprisingly tasty.

Then, later that night, I tossed the chicken bones in a pot with some carrots and celery and let it simmer for as long as I could before bed.  Really, to do it justice, I should have waited and given myself more time to let it simmer, but I got excited about it and didn't want to wait.  According to this website: http://simplemom.net/how-to-make-homemade-basics/, I should have let it simmer for 24-36 hours.  I just don't feel comfortable leaving a pot on the stove while I'm not there to watch it.  And since no one in their right mind would stay in their house to watch a pot for 24-36 hours, I did more research and found that this blogger: http://www.recipegirl.com/2010/03/04/how-to-make-rich-and-flavorful-chicken-stock/ says that you only need four hours.  Ergo, I decided to squish in the chicken stock making that night. 

After letting it simmer for almost four hours, I strained the solids from the liquids and separate them into two bowls.  One is obviously trash, the other I covered and refrigerated.  It made a lot of stock that I was able to use for cooking rice, quinoa, and even chicken pot pie.  I just ran out, so I need to make some more to make chicken noodle soup, but next time I'll make a few changes.  First, I will definitely simmer it for longer.  I'm sure that would have added to its flavor and nutrition.  Also, I just used carrots and celery last time because that's all I had on hand, but an onion and some herbs would definitely help jazz up the flavor! 

This is a good way to get the benefits of broth without the sodium.  Bouillon cubes have tons of salt and other preservatives, and can't even compare to homemade stock nutritionally.  The sites I posted above have more info on that.  So go get yourself a chicken and start cookin!

------------------UPDATE--------------------

Okay people, I've learned a thing or two more about chicken cooking since I first wrote this post.  First, I found a better recipe that I really love and it is the easiest thing ever because it's a crockpot recipe.  Check it out here.

Secondly, I fully stopped shopping for groceries at Wal-Mart because they continued to disappoint in their produce and meats and because I became more convicted about eating real food.  Which I don't do 100% every day, but at least in what I grocery shop for I do.

Here's an example of their non-organic produce.  This pepper, like almost all of Wal-Mart's produce, been preserved by pesticides to look great on the outside, but once I cut in, I saw that this was a very old pepper, molded on the inside!  Gross.

 

Thirdly, I was making a fatal mistake when I first followed a chicken broth making recipe.  At this point I can't remember if the instructions clarified this or not, but it doesn't even matter.  When I first followed that recipe for the chicken in a crock pot, I also followed her recipe for making chicken broth.

And it was then that I had such a big AHA! moment about my original chicken broth.

This is why it makes so much sense to make the chicken in a crock pot.  Let it cook all day and eat it for dinner.  But when you take the chicken out of the crock pot, leave the juices in there.  Cut the meat off the bones when it's cool enough to do so, and put all the bones back in the crock pot. 

THEN you fill it up with water and vegetables.  You don't clean everything up, dump out the juices and then refill a pot with water and the bones, like I did originally.  And because it's in the crock pot all night, that means it cooks a lot longer too, which helps.

Compare that picture above with this one here.  The darkness of the color is ridiculously different.  The first one is almost clear!  

And the richness of the color in this picture, my friends?  Those are nutrients.  They're kind of a big deal.

So the chicken I make and broth I make from it to use in other recipes are now both exponentially more nutritious than before.  Hurray!

Finally, I also learned another trick of pouring the broth into glass jars and freezing them, both to help it last longer and to put it in smaller sizes.  Freezing the bowl would take too much space and be a darn headache trying to defrost for just a small amount of broth.

Happy cooking!