Monday, November 23, 2009

Chicken and dumplings

As I was making tonight's dinner I thought "I really need to take pictures of this" but I didn't!
I adapted a recipe (shock!) from my church's cook book for Chicken & Dumplings. Since it was just the kids and me eating dinner I just used 2 thawed skin-on, bone-in thighs instead of a whole fryer, although I did debone them. Instead of boiling the chicken, I cooked them over med-high heat with a tiny bit of oil in the 4-quart stainless sauce pan. I had seasoned them with Adobo seasoning before I put them in the pan and added ground pepper on the side without skin. I cut up the bones into 3 pieces each and fried them up too to add extra flavor to the broth that I'd be making after the chicken was done cooking. When the chicken was done I put a thigh in each of the kids' bowls (pasta bowls not soup bowls) and set to work on the broth. I added a cup of frozen homemade concentrated chicken broth to the pan on the stove, being careful to get all the flavorful crusty brown bits scrapped off of the bottom from the frying of the chicken. After that I added about 4 or 5 cups of water and a tsp of minced garlic, then brought it all to a boil. While I waited for the broth to heat up I measured out a cup of flour, added in 1/4 a tsp less of salt than the recipe called for and added in a 1/2 tsp of poultry seasoning that the recipe didn't call for. Once the broth was boiling I took 1 cup of the broth and added it to my flour, stirred it up and was going to follow the recipe and roll it out thin on a floured surface. Then I remembered that I like my dumplings in balls so instead of cut flat dumplings I did drop dumplings - grabbing a kid-sized ball of dough with my fork and dropping it into the boiling broth. 10 minutes later dinner was ready and the kids loved it!
Of course Paul was meated out before he finished his thigh but both of them ate all 5 of their dumplings and sucked down the broth. I just had broth and dumplings. There was both broth and dumplings left over so I stored them separately so the dumplings wouldn't dissolve from being in the broth all night. The broth was great so I'm going to add some carrots, onions, corn and ayote to it tomorrow to turn in into more of a soup and then add in the remaining dumplings.
I'm looking forward to it and maybe I'll remember to actually take the pictures instead of just think about it!

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