Sunday, February 22, 2009

Soup! Or Not.

I made chicken soup today. Except I didn't. Somehow.

What happened? First, I roasted a chicken last night. Callie, Iain, and The Staff ate most of it, but I used the carcass to make stock and shredded the last meaty bits off to use in soup.

Fast-forward to today. I took the stock out of the fridge (where it had been chilling since I strained it last night) and removed the congealed fat. I used that to fry a chopped sweet onion, added garlic, dried thyme, Greek seasoning, three wedges of lemon, and a bit of celery, and poured in my stock plus about 6 cups of chicken broth. Add tiny minced carrots. Add shredded chicken.

It was a lovely, bubbling broth of goodness. So I got out the star-shaped pasta Iain helped me pick out last week. One small box. Perfect. In it went.

And 20 minutes later, I got this:


Not soup. More like chicken risotto. Delicious, but basically a pasta product, not a mess of potage.

Ok. I can roll with that. After all, it's tasty. So I boxed it up for lunches (I'll freeze some, though, because the total volume was close to 5 quarts), and I guess that's a lesson learned. Next time, add a cup of pasta, not a pound.

2 comments:

SarahHub said...

Still looks yummy to me! I tried to make turkey stock, but it ended up thick like gelatin. Any idea what I did wrong?

Fiona said...

You didn't do anything wrong!

There's gelatin in the bones and connective tissue, so when you make homemade stock, sometimes it gels. It will melt again if heated, and that gelled quality makes the soup really silky.

You can also use that stuff in sauce. You just scoop out a bit and add it to sauce and it will provide a strong turkey flavor and a little thickening.

If you buy commercial "base" like restaurants do, it looks like jelly. It's also very salty - FYI.