Sunday, January 8, 2012

Using up Pantry Items #2-Chicken Broth

Few simple ingredients

This is not rocket science, nor Iron Chef's material, but if you never had home-made chicken broth you don't know what you are missing.  My maternal grandmother was the queen of chicken broth.  If I close my eyes I can see her sitting at her marble table, eating a bowl of piping hot chicken broth with some little pastina floating inside.  It was also a favorite of mine.  We even had our own private game, I would go downstairs to her apartment and ask if I could have "la solita", or the usual one, because it was a typical hospital food and I must have tasted it during one of her hospital stays.  I miss my nonna Anita, although she was a stern woman, and lost her mother was she was young and had to help rise her siblings, I knew she loved me deeply.

Wasn't she beautiful?


There is no comparison between a store-bought chicken broth and the one that you can make at home with little effort and few ingredients.  Next time you eat a whole chicken save the carcass (and some of the other bones if you want), add an onion, two carrots, a stalk of celery, few stems of parsley, cover with cold water and bring to a simmer.  Simmer covered for two hours, discard the solids and cool.  To remove all the fat, chill overnight in the refrigerator and remove all the coagulated fat from the top.  Simple and delicious!

Simmering

To keep with my only new year's resolution, I used things I had on hand and made this broth for the next dish I am working on, so stay tuned!

Yum!


5 comments:

Rosa's Yummy Yums said...

What a beauty! I really love her hairdo on the middle picture. Thta broth looks wonderful and comforting.

Cheers,

Rosa

Diana said...

Since you use the bones (carcass), what you have is stock, not broth, but I bet it tastes wonderful, no matter what you call it!

Laura said...

Rosa, yes, she was beautiful. I love the picture where she is looking at the camera, and yes the hairdo is priceless.

Diana, I guess I used the wrong word since in Italian we only have one word, brodo, whether it is just meat, bones, or vegetables that you boil, and then it gets flavored. Since I was showing how to make stock I should not have called it broth but since I was also talking about something you eat afterwords, I guess using broth also made sense. Thanks for the visit.

Simona Carini said...

That's on my to-do list for tomorrow. We finished a chicken today and so tomorrow I'll put carcass, bones, trimmings and some extra pieces I had in the freezer into the pot. In terms of vegetables, I also add corn cobs, green leaves of leeks and other trimmings. Then you are half-way through making a nice soup.

Simona Carini said...

Clarification: I meant that once you have the stock, you are half-way through making a nice soup.

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails