If you're going to kill the chicken... EAT the chicken

I think everyone has added the pre-cooked rotisserie chicken from the grocery store to their standard "meals for the week" plan.  Maybe it's just me but I don't think so.  I used to get a whole chicken and cook it until I realized that it was often cheaper to buy the finished product.  Costco has a GIANT one, because it's Costco, for $4.99 and Whole Foods routinely has a "meal deal" where you can get a pound of potato salad or macaroni and cheese plus the rotisserie chicken for $7.99.

The point of this is that I have found that after the initial meal of roasted chicken a lot of my friends are just getting rid of the rest of the chicken.  THE HORROR!!

So I'm launching a campaign..... If you're going to buy the chicken... EAT the chicken.

Step One:  Pull the usable chicken off the bones.

The more broke I am, the more meals I can make out of one chicken so after we eat the initial meal I let it cool off and then I pull off all the meat and put it aside.  (As I add posts of recipes I use the extra chicken in, I will add them here.)

Enchiladas

Step Two:  The skin and bones go in the crock pot.

Generally when I do this I am also making soup and/or chicken salad or some other meal that involves veggies so I throw the celery leaves, carrot peals, onion skins in the crock pot too.  This is not necessary but if we are trying to make use of every part of our food we might as well use the veggie scraps too and it helps give a little extra flavor.

Step Three:  Cover it all with water.  I think I usually use about 8-12 cups depending on the size of the chicken.  The less water you use, the richer your stock will be.  You can always add more later.

Step Four:  Boil the heck out of it.  I put it on low in the crock pot overnight or all day long.






Step Five:  Once it has cooked strain the nasty chicken parts and old veggies out.  I like to use a colander with cheese cloth or a loosely woven tea towel over the top of a large bowl or pot.

Here is the leftover in the tea towel.  The good stuff is underneath this carnage.

What you are left with is the yummy stock.

Warning!!  If you taste it now you are going to think something is wrong.  It isn't going to taste like much of anything.  What you've made is stock, not broth.  Broth is, as far as I can figure, seasoned stock.  So if you want it to taste like broth, add salt!

Step Six:  Use this in whatever recipe you would use any other stock or broth.