Side Bar: Waste not, want not!

I've decided to interrupt my regularly scheduled program to discuss a topic very dear to my heart. And that is wasting food. I'm not great about this, recently on a fridge clean out, I threw away what seemed like a mountain of food! When I was in college, I spent a summer working at a little cafe in Birmingham. It was privately owned, not a chain, and it even had a culinary school trained chef. One thing that she taught me was to use EVERYTHING, if you can. For example, we would roast chickens on a daily basis. We used the breast meat for chicken salad, the dark meat for soups/stews, and we would even use the bones/undesirable meat to flavor homemade chicken stock.

Today, I'm going to tell you how to do this with a store bought rotisserie chicken! I do have a couple of free range, organic roasters in my freezer, just waiting to be cooked, but that requires some planning, and I usually buy a rotisserie chicken about once a month when I haven't planned dinner!

Day 1/Meal 1: Rotisserie Chicken Breasts with Mashed Potatoes and Salad. I think you can figure out how to put this one together on your own ;). Go ahead and pull the rest of meal off the bones and put it in a tupperware container, in the fridge. Put the carcass (terrible word, sorry I had to use it!) in a big zip loc bag in the fridge.

Day 2/Meal 2: Chicken Salad! I had to improvise a little with this one...but there is not a thing wrong with using what you have in your fridge/pantry! Especially when you're just fixing it for yourself.

My Chicken Salad looked like this:
1 c. diced leftover Chicken breast, and some dark meat (which I don't love)
1 rib celery, chopped
2 strawberries (I usually use grapes, but I'm using what I had!)
1/2 c. golden raisins
1/2 c. nonfat greek yogurt (traditionally mayo, but I didn't want the calories)
salt & pepper to taste

Day 2 & beyond!: Homemade Chicken Stock!!!
I'm going to share with you a method, not a recipe for this one. Really because I don't have a recipe!

Step 1: Veggies- In a large stockpot, I put in about 4 ribs of celery, cut in half. 1 cup or baby carrots and 1 onion quartered. This is a good combo of veggies to use in stock, but don't sweat it if you don't have them. Use what you got! If you have some fresh thyme or rosemary, bundle it with kitchen twine and throw that in too!

Step 2: Place your carcass (mine still had some good meat on it!) on top of the veg and cover with water.

Step 3: Boil, and then simmer...we're talking about 2 hours. You want your whole house to smell like chicken noodle soup!

A word - your liquid will reduce, you may need to add more water, just keep an eye on it!

Step 4: Take out the stuff. I set aside some of the cooked carrots, celery, and good meat. After you've taken out the bulk of your the food stuff, strain the broth through a fine mesh sieve into a 8 cup pyrex (if you have one).

Step 5: Mine yielded about 4 cups of very concentrated stock...so I added 4 cups of water to make 8 cups! Cover with saran wrap and put it in the fridge - OVERNIGHT!

Step 6: After your stock has been in the fridge overnight, the fat will rise to the top and you can skim it off with a spoon. I then stored my stock in 2 cup portion sizes in freezer bags. Lay it flat in the freezer to freeze!

There you have it! 8 cups of homemade stock!

Now...remember the cooked celery, carrots, and chicken we set aside? We're not wasting a thing, right? I threw it in the blender with some water and made my own Chicken Dinner Puree for Nora. SHE LOVED IT!!!!

Now, go try it out!