Let’s workshop this chicken stew.

I’ve been slow-cooking the original cut-up chicken breasts in chicken broth and a little bit of water for a couple of hours now. I’ve got the carcass of an other chicken to mine for the dark meat, yes; and going to add the potatoes in a couple of hours, sure. Salted, peppered, onion powder, a couple of bay leaves, some herbs de Provence (whatever the heck those are). No actual onions this time, because they never come out the way that I want them to. Anyway, what am I missing? Actual dumplings are probably beyond my skill level, although I have a damaged refrigerated pie crust that I could probably turn into impromptu lumps of dough.

16 thoughts on “Let’s workshop this chicken stew.”

  1. Do you any pancake mix? It makes acceptable dumplings,really.
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    2 cups pancake mix
    2/3 cup water
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    Mix together pancake mix and water with a fork, don’t over mix as it should be thick, but not lumpy. A pinch of seasoned salt improves the dumpling-y flavor.
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    Add dumpling mix in large spoon fulls into chicken stew. Simmer 10 minutes uncovered, then 10 minutes covered.

    1. For that matter, the really cheap canned biscuits (not the layered kind) pinched into about 3-4 dumplings per biscuit works pretty well as well. I like to season them a bit with salt and some sage. Initially they’ll bloat up huge (or yuuuuge, as I guess you say this season) but then shrink down.
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      What I normally do for soup is, on day 1 I’ll have brought home one of those rotisserie chickens from costco for five bucks. I slice off the leg quarters, which is the good stuff, and we eat those for meal number one. Then on day two in the morning, I’ll remove most of the rest of the white meat, cut the bones in half, and throw in a stock pot with some celery, salt, whatever, to make stock. After half a day of steeping, I strain off the stock, and I’ll dice one of the breasts, and then either do chicken-noodle soup, or chicken and dumplings. That leaves another breast for some_random_chicken_dish later, but three meals for two out of a five dollar chicken isn’t bad.

      1. We do about the same, only not with the $5 chickens because the spice mix hits some of our food allergies.
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        Never have managed to get a crock pot to make a good bone broth, finally went back to an all-day simmer, with a little salt and cider vinegar to leech the minerals and separate the fat.
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        Broth also freezes and thaws very nicely, there’s probably over a gallon – in single-meal storage containers – in the deep freeze right now.
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        Mew

  2. Pie crust sounds interesting. I usually throw in whatever pasta I have around. As for veggies, celery ads a nice subtle flavor and carrots to compliment the ‘taters. A touch of garlic, maybe?

  3. Carrots and celery along with your onion powder could pass as a faux mirepoix. Tyme, chopped tomatoes, Kidney Beans.

    1. Carrots and garlic and it turns out that we still have a bunch of rice which is good because I could have sworn we had potatoes.

      1. Rice is good. Add just enough flour (or, in my case, tapioca starch) to thicken it up, and call it a “hearty chicken stew”.
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        Get the soup boiling and add raw eggs, and call it “egg drop”.
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        Mew

  5. Bisquick makes good dumplings in a pinch if you have that available.
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    Happy Birthday!

    2. Careful where you leave that! I am now no longer able to keep certain baking supplies in my house without… consequences*, because my brother’s wife showed this to me awhile back.
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      *delicious, chocolaty consequences…

  7. “I’ve been slow-cooking the original cut-up chicken breasts”

    Let me stop you right there. White meat shouldn’t be slow cooked at all, because the slow cooking just draws moisture out of the meat (the proteins in the muscle tighten, which pushes out moisture like wringing a towel). Dark meat (whether chicken thighs, pork shoulder or belly, or beef chuck) has more gelatin in it, which takes time to disintegrate, which is why you slow cook them.

    Not too much more advice for now, though I’d say that in the future if you want to make a soup/stew with white meat, I’d recommend cutting it up ahead of time and giving it a few hours in the fridge in a brine before putting it in the slow cooker (maybe an hour on “High”), or going with dark meat.

    Also, in the future if you’re looking for a whole-chicken slow cook solution, I’d highly recommend Nom Nom Paleo’s recipe: http://nomnompaleo.com/post/4807547385/slow-cooker-roast-chicken-and-gravy

    1. It was more like ‘simmer the cut-up chicken in broth and then add the gleanings from the chicken carcass later in the day,’ but this is good info to have. 🙂

  9. A whole fryer chicken, cut up and skinned. Two cans of condensed cream of chicken soup, and a large Vidalia cut into chunks. Pepper the hell out of it, using one of those little pepper jars with a built-in grinder. Cook on low for five hours.

    Use the frozen chewy dumplings. They’re just strips of flour and palm oil. Put them in thirty minutes before it’s done.

    This is basically the recipe on the Campbell’s can, plus the pepper. It really makes a difference.

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