calherewecome

What does one do with the leftover carcass of a chicken? Last Tuesday we did a roasted chicken for our weekly family dinner. So we had a leftover chicken carcass. So I decided to do a chicken soup for dinner tonight.

Here’s how you do it. Put the carcus into a stew pot and cover with water. Boil/simmer for 3-3.5 hours. After the three hours take all of the chicken out of the pot and put into a sieve. Usually the carcass falls apart pretty much. Take all of the meat out of the pot and put into a sieve. Remove any of the chicken bones that you can find. Warning, the bones and cartilage pieces will be small. In our case we also had some leftover chicken in the refrigerator. That got thrown in as well. The concept is to clean out our refrigerator of leftovers before our family dinner next Tuesday.

This also works quite well for turkey. And if you are not ready to make the soup right away then freeze the carcas. It’ll keep. I first learned about this idea from an article about Michael Dukakis (former governor of Mass.)

Return the chicken to the pot. Add 1c of carrots and 1 c of celery to the pot. I like to add noodles to the mix. I cook 8 oz. of noodles for about 10 minutes. Drain and add to the pot. Add whatever vegetables you like. Perhaps, peas, maybe corn. Some folks prefer rice to noodles.  In that case add about 1 cup of uncooked rice to the pot. 

Also, this time I used a packet of chicken gravy mix. Cook according to the directions on the package, then add to the pot. It makes the soup a little bit thicker.

Cook over very low heat for another two hours. Serve with fresh bread. Very tasty.

This entry was posted on July 2, 2016 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Recipes. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Chicken, Leftovers, Soup