Cooking Projects

My Chicken, Peep

This would have been a lovely picture of my homemade roasted chicken, courtesy of the recipe for roasted chicken in Julia's Kitchen Wisdom, but I forgot to get a picture of it, and then we ate our dinner and I destroyed the carcass:

Destroyed!

I'm not good at carving, and I certainly don't make things pretty when I rip the meat off the bones of a chicken. I just try to get as much off of there as I possibly can. I was hoping for more meat than what I acquired from this chicken, but then again I did end up with another mouth to feed(which is alright by me as I love to feed others).

After cooking a whole roasted chicken stuffed with celery leaves, a whole sliced lemon, and half an onion, and cooking up a batch of mashed potatoes that made 8 servings, I wanted to cook more food.

I spotted my target: the leftover corn bread. It was going stale anyway, and so I sped up the process by baking it in the oven (after cutting it into 1/2 inch cubes) at 350F for 30 minutes. This did a great job of drying the bread out. The food processor attachment that came with my blender, an Oster 12 speed, did a good job at shredding these bread cubes into bread crumbs (the only other decent job its done in its life was when it made hummus).

Cornbread Cubes

I also turned the chicken carcass into a stock. I followed a recipe for stock from, once again, Julia's Kitchen Wisdom. While the chicken was cooking I took the time to cut up a bunch of carrots, onions, and celery to cook in the stock. I put them in the pot, and then I put the pot in the fridge until I was ready for it. I also made an herb bouquet from a recipe in the book. This was a delicious stock, and I used it tonight when I made soup, but more on that later.

Cornbread Crumbs

After all of this cooking, and visiting with a friend, 11pm showed up and I was exhausted from all of my day's events (including staining my desk, doing chemistry school work, etc.) and I headed to bed to gear up for another day of projects and good food.