I had leftover chicken. I'm always looking for fun things to do with leftover chicken. This time I decided on a soup. I got the recipe from cooks.com which is actually one of my least favorite sites to navigate. Let's just dive in!

Ingredients: 
3c Chicken Broth
2oz Rice, Uncooked (for brothier soup... 3oz rice for thicker soup)
Chicken (Optional... I just used a little bit of leftovers)
2 Eggs
3 Tbsp Lemon Juice
Salt 
Pepper

Directions:
Bring the broth to a boil
Add the rice, cover, and reduce heat 
Simmer for about 20 minutes, or until the rice is tender (be careful with this, rice is shy and doesn't like to be peeked at)
In a separate dish beat the eggs and the lemon juice together
When rice is done, slowly add the egg mix into the rice and broth while stirring rice constantly in a clockwise direction (or anticlockwise...). Basically you want to be pouring into the whirlpool that you create by stirring. 
Add chicken if you used any
Heat the soup without boiling 

Notes:
I didn't season this until after it was in the bowl. It only needed a smidge of salt, and a light peppering. I think I would use a little more lemon next time. 

This could easily be a vegetarian dish. Just use vegetable broth (which you can make yourself!) and no chicken! This soup would probably be really good with tofu too!

We used brown rice with this, which is not my favorite, but it didn't affect the flavor.

This was one of the easiest meals I've ever made. 

The recipe says it serves 4. It does if you're using it as a side dish or an appetizer. As a meal, it serves 2 with no leftovers. 

Review:
Super easy

Super tasty

I want to make this all the time. Seriously. 

Total Score:
​5

Disclaimer: I'm about to use the words broth and stock interchangeably. I know there is a difference. For ease of communication, I use them both for the same thing. I'm pretty sure I already did a turkey-stock post... 

We got some chickens and ducks this last spring. We got 12 chickens and 4 ducks. Now only 5 chickens remain and our freezer is full. So, I decided to cook one of the chickens in the slow cooker. I put a smidgen of butter on the bottom of the crockpot, then I cut up an onion (store bought supplemented with home grown) and some garlic (homegrown). Then I seasoned the chicken with homegrown herbs and salt. Cooked it on low for 4 hours because it was a small bird. I didn't want to make a whole blog for slow cooker chicken. I may in the future, but this blog is for something else. This blog is for chicken stock/chicken bone broth. 

Ingredients:
Chicken carcass, fat, skin, any leftover chicken bits and drippings
Onion
Garlic
Salt 
Peppercorns
Carrots
Mushrooms
2 Tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar (leaches all the delicious and nutritious stuff out of the bones)
...Honestly, you can use whatever you want, but I don't recommend potatoes, leafy greens, dark green veggies etc... they get pretty bitter.  I personally am not terribly fond of carrots, so I only use a few, and then I overdo it on the mushrooms, because I love them. 

Directions:
Combine all ingredients in a slow cooker or stock pot.
Add water until your stock pot or crock pot is almost full.
Simmer for 1-2 days
Taste after 24 hours, if you want it stronger, cook it longer. 
When the stock is done, strain it into a container. Some people are concerned with the clarity of their stock. I am not one of those people. If you are one of those people... good luck. 

This particular picture is from the slow cooked chicken, so it had a lot of onion and seasonings in the slow cooker already. I just put the carcass back in after I cleaned it, and I put water on top of it. Easy as stock. 

Notes:
Go easy on the seasonings the first time, your stock may taste a little bland, but you can always add seasonings to it when you use it. It's really hard to recover from over seasoning something. You're looking for a good chicken flavor. 

Parsley is a great addition to chicken broth based dishes when you go to use your broth. I used to think it was useless, but it really amps up the flavor. 

You can use the carcass and veggies a second time for a weaker batch of stock to use instead of water for rice etc.

This is very important: don't let it cook too long without stirring... the floating bits can burn, and then your stock is almost unusable. Trust me on this. I lost 5 gallons of stock one day because of it. 

This is my favorite part of stock: I take all of my onion and garlic papers and cut ends and freeze them. If an onion is a little squishy and I don't want to cook with it, I put it in the freezer. When I go to make a batch of this delicious bone broth, I use all the papers and ends and everything that I had collected in the freezer. The papers add to the color and quality of the broth. Here's an example: TC will buy a bunch of carrots and then let them sit in the fridge. I don't care for carrots, but they're good to add in stock. So, when they start to lose their crispness and aren't as good for eating, I freeze them and use them for stock. Nothing goes to waste!