The Big DumpTruck

Another day to sit around hoovering up anything edible in sight. You know, I wasn't looking forward to going back to work after the long weekend, but I was looking forward to getting paid for being there. Two days off in one week equals a HUGE hit in my paycheck. I can only do so much work from home, maybe squeezing out 2 or 3 hours. The rest is a hit to my bottom line. And all the Christmas candy will be a hit to my bottom.

In good news, I get to have leftovers for lunch today. In Dumptruck Crockpot Adventures, yesterday I made a whole chicken. And it was gooooooood. The most amazing thing to me was the chicken stock I ended up with. I have NEVER made chicken stock this flavorful and dark and wonderful. I'm beside myself just thinking about how I should use it. Well, to be honest, I have to admit that I want to heat up half of it, add back some chicken and some pasta and have myself a bowl of soup. But I almost feel like I shouldn't "waste" it that way, that I should keep it to use in recipes. It's that amazing. I suppose I can always do this again, of course. It's not like it was an expensive meal.

The recipe, for those wondering, is below. It's sort of modified from my cookbook, because I am using a 5 quart crockpot and was trying to make the best use to that space.

1 whole 1.5 pound chicken, rinsed and dried
1/2 of one large onion, thickly sliced
3 pieces of celery (3 stalks?), chopped in 1-inch pieces
approx 3 sliced carrots (I used what was left of a bag of carrot sticks, so this is a guess).
1/2 cup of white wine (I used a pinot)

Put the veggies on the bottom of the crock pot
Put the chicken on top of the veggies
pour the wine on top of the chicken
cook on low for 7-8 hours.

(We cooked it for 8 hours, but I think that was meant for a larger chicken (2-3 pounds)). The 1.5 pounder fit very well in my crock pot, and I should have reduced the cooking time a little, but it wasn't like it was tough and overcooked...it was just impossible to remove from the crockpot because every single piece of meat fell off the bones. I was laughing like a fool trying to get this thing out of the crock pot...it fell into 5 pieces before I even lifted it 2 inches up.)

I didn't measure but there has to be about 2 cups of stock, which is like some made science experiment (How to turn half a cup of liquid into two cups of liquid, after skimming off most of the fat). I assume much of it is from the celery and onion.

So for those of you old hats with cooking stuff like this or using a crock pot, you are probably rolling your eyes, but I am a complete newbie when it comes to this stuff, and it thrills me that I'm actually cooking really delish stuff with hardly any work. That is my kind of cooking. I leave the heavy lifting to the restaurant chefs, my friends.