Easy chicken stock

Flavorful, frugal and lowfat, homemade chicken stock adds special taste without salt and artificial additives. My freezer always has containers of stock and of ingredients waiting to become stock.

The most exciting part to me about making stock at home is that it re-uses ingredients from other dishes. Just keep freezer bags or plastic containers with bones from roasted chickens and trimmings of vegetables in your freezer and add to them (keep the vegetables separate from the bones). The best vegetable trimmings are the ends of carrots, the tops of celery, the washed tops of leeks, the stems of parsley and the ends of summer squashes (minus the hard stem). Cookbook author Crescent Dragonwagon recommended adding apple peels to stock, and I've done that with good results too.
If you're in no mood to keep vegetable trimmings, just make simple stocks with the bones only.

I used to leave a stock pot on the stove all afternoon a few times a year, but I found a way to make stock that requires even less attention to the pot: use the slow cooker (aka Crock-Pot).

Fill a slow cooker with bones. Cover all the bones with water, put the lid on the slow cooker and cook on the low setting about eight or ten hours. After about four or five hours, add vegetable trimmings and a couple cloves of garlic if desired. If I'm cooking stock overnight, I have no desire to set an alarm clock for four hours later to add veggies, so I just make the bones-only stock if I'm not awake while it's cooking.

If you forget about the stock and cook longer than 10 hours, the more the bones and connective tissues dissolve, and the more jelly-like the stock will become when it is cooled. This gel is nutritious, containing protein and calcium, and it returns to its liquid state when reheated.

When the stock is finished cooking, put the bones in a mesh strainer over a pot so they will drain. Then toss them out and ladle the stock through the strainer into the pot. Use the ladle so that sediment in the stock stays at the bottom of the slow cooker. Put the pot into the refrigerator overnight to cool. Remove the fat layer the next day and store the stock in plastic containers in the freezer. My favorites are 32-oz yogurt containers because it's a way to re-use what would otherwise be trash, and 4 cups of stock is a convenient quantity to use.

Although I don't make other stocks like beef or veal or fish, I'm sure the only part of this process that would change is a slightly longer cooking time for beef bones and shorter time for fish bones. The same stock process I describe works for turkey carcasses after the holidays, too, or for starting a soup from a ham bone.

Save your food containers and food "waste" for stock, and you get a large quantity of nutritious liquid for the cost of leaving a light bulb on for the day.