4 Working-Mama-Tips For Making Chicken Bone Broth

When I think about all the changes we have made to our diets in the last couple of years, a few stand out as more important than others. Switching from highly processed soybean oil to more stable, less processed fats like coconut oil, butter and lard is on the short list. Also making homemade stock or bone broth has been a game changer for me.

In the beginning I said that I would never make my own stock. I really did!! I was so anxious about the inconvenience of making stock that I clung to my bouillon like Thing 2 to his favorite train. I had made stock before and the result was a weak broth that needed so much salt to taste good that I figured it was easier to keep a couple of cubes on hands. That was until I was introduced to the technique of making bone broth.

To make bone broth one must take bones and simmer them for hours with aromatics like onions, celery, carrots and black peppercorns. Chicken bone broth must be simmered for a minimum for 4 hours. Beef bones must be cooked for closer to 10 or 12 hours. The resulting liquid is a dark colored, cloudy, meaty, gelatin filled elixir. Bone broth is a far cry from all those half assed recipes that call you to cook a whole raw chicken in a pot of water for an hour. Quick broths tend to be clear and even slightly bitter tasting in my opinion. The reward for all those hours spent tending to the pot is a broth so thick with nutrition and protein that it is an excellent support to otherwise meatless meals.

I have made chicken bone broth many times now. And I have done so with everything from a leftover roast bird to raw backs and necks. But my favorite chicken part to use is chicken feet. Chicken feet produce hands down the most flavorful and gelatin rich of all chicken broths. I have finally found a source for feet that is local, pastured and organic. Pastured chickens generally cost around $8 per pound. But the feet are sold off at a slightly lower cost. And fortunately the farm from which I buy my feet will sell a whole bag of feet, so I don’t have to buy a $45 bird just to get two feet for stock! My feet are approximately $6 for one and one half pounds. And that makes about a gallon and a half of stock.

Properly made bone broth should gel when cooled overnight in the refrigerator. If you have followed all the directions here and your broth does not gel then it just has a little too much water in it. Chances are when you use it to make something, like soup, it will gel up nicely after you have cooked with it. When cooking with feet, I have been told that clipping off the nails is super important. However, I generally dump the feet in frozen with no additional prep. I figure they will boil for 6 or so hours and whatever buggies the nails would have would stand no chance. Also, be sure to commit the full time and boil the feet until they are really beginning to break up and fall apart on their own. If your feet still look like they did when you dropped them in, you are throwing away a lot of goodness. If the skin looks ragged and the joints are beginning to come apart, then you have reached the zone. Keep going, it takes at least 4 hours of stovetop simmering to get there and you can easily boil them longer than that. There is no sense in throwing away nourishment!

Bone broth is super easy. But that isn’t why you aren’t currently making it right? You don’t make broth because it takes too long or you aren’t home for long enough periods of time, right? That is certainly what I struggle with. So how does a busy mama work something as simple as bone broth into her already maxed out schedule? I have a couple of tricks to share that make it easier for me to keep this important foodstuff around the house.

1) Save your vegetable scraps in a plastic bag in the freezer. Bone broth requires aromatic vegetables be boiled with the bones. But who wants to take great fresh {expensive} veggies, just boil them and finally throw them away? Now I freeze my scraps. When I chop a carrot, the nibs and ends go into my freezer bag instead of the garbage. Same with celery and onion ends. You can even throw onion papers in there. You will end up straining it out so there is nothing wrong with the papers! My freezer bag is where I throw all of the uneaten carrot sticks that come home from Thing 1’s lunch box! I generally save celery, carrots, onions or celery root. More good things to save would be ginger, garlic or garli scapes, leek trimmings, scallions or lemons that you have squeezed. They will of course flavor the broth.

2) Break up your time. Often I am busy or away from the house during the day, even on weekends. So I will start a pot of stock at 6pm and let it boil until 9pm. Before I go to bed I will stick the whole pot in the fridge. The next night I will repeat until the stock has boiled enough. When it comes to stock I am not concerned about the heating and cooling rules that apply to uncooked meats or leftovers. Stock is a food that is boiled at a high temperature for a long period of time. In the cooking phase I don’t worry much about it, and it helps my schedule to where I can make stock on a weeknight!

3) Freeze stock in smaller portions. At the end of the process I will freeze the stock into smaller 2 and 4 cup containers for longer storage. That way I don’t end up thawing and refreezing great blocks of stock. And then I can bring out exactly how much I need, a 2 cup portion for making gravy or rice or a 4 cup portion for making soup. Soup only takes 20-30 minutes with previously prepared broths, yet they taste like they have been cooking for hours! I will use 1 ½ to 2 gallons of water to boil 1 ½ pounds of chicken feet. That yields enough stock for my family for 3 to 4 weeks.

4) Put your crock pot to good use! I do think the stovetop is best. The heat is higher and so the stock bubbles. The bubbles agitate the bones and veggies making them break up and enrich the broth. BUT…I have made great bone broths in the crock pot when I don’t have enough time for a stove top job. I have even started a batch of broth at 9pm and had it cook until 5 or 6am. Then it is waiting for you when you wake up!! I don’t get as gelatin-y of a broth with the crock pot, but finishing it on the stove top might be an answer to that.

Using the above tricks I have managed to keep bone broths regularly on hand and the junk filled cubes out of the house! Considering the extreme cost of ethically raised meats, bone broth is a wonderfully nourishing addition to your diet. Plus the taste is so rich that I can always count on Thing 1 eating whatever veggies that I boil in them. When he takes a hot thermos full of veggie soup to school I always know that he is getting a healthy and nutritious lunch. I am truly thankful that he likes soup as much as he does.

If you are a stressed out lady {or fella} with too many obligations and not enough time to nourish yourself, consider making time to make bone broth. Using the tricks I mention will help to fit the task into your crazy schedule, and the nourishment will support your health!

Enjoy!

This post is shared with Traditional Tuesdays and Real Food Wednesdays and Simple Lives Thursdays and Fight Back Fridays

More Clever Time Saving Tricks!

This is a busy time of year for me at work. Couple that with Holiday Cheer and Holiday Chores and that makes for one tired Mama. But I don't want to throw all my hard work out the window. In the last week I have discovered two things that make my life a little easier.

First off, I have trouble making my pizza crust on a week night because the crust needs to rise for an hour before baking the pizza. I have tried refrigerating it, and the result was kind of gummy and gross. This really gets me because pizza could be such a great weeknight meal. I could chop up all the veggies in the morning, and that night I could crumble the cheese (I have been using a chevre style cheese rather than mozzarella), dust with veggies and olives and voila! It would be dinner on the table in 20 minutes. But with no easy crust, how am I supposed to accomplish that??

So last Friday I tried making my Whole Wheat Pizza Crust (Haha-That was like post number 5 and I am STILL making that recipe!) before I walked out the door in the morning. I mixed up all the flour, yeast, honey oil and water and......I just let it sit on the counter. Anticlimactic, no?

Well, before now I was pretty scared to let food sit out all day. But now that I am more comfortable with cultured food, I know that letting the dough rise all day, rather than the hour called for by the recipe, will just make the yeast flavor more pronounced. DH asked me if the dough was twice the size as normal (he was working late and didn't get to eat it). It worked and I came home to a lovely pizza dough. Thing 1 helped me punch it down and roll it out. I am now getting them in the kitchen about three days a week to help with dinner, instead of just turning the TV on while I cook. Let's hope I can keep up with that. But long story short, the crust was good. It was easy and I will now include homemade pizza among my other weeknight meals.

And secondly, I made homemade beef bone broth in my crock pot. A while back when I made beef broth I did it on a week that our babysitter called out from work. I labored over the pot on the stove all day. I left it running, but fortunately it was a rainy day, so it was no problem to be inside with the kids. What would I do on a normal week?

This time I put my bones, veggies, herbs and vinegar in the crock pot before I went to bed and put it on a low 10-hour setting. The following morning before I left for work I unplugged the pot, then plugged it back in and started it on another 10 hour setting. That night after the kids went to bed I strained all the veggies, squeezed out every last drop of stock that I could get and refrigerated it overnight. The following morning I took the tallow off the top and boiled it down, froze it into cubes. Looking back at the week, I don't feel that I worked especially hard for this bone broth. I didn't wake up extra early to do it. I had the time to get it done. It wasn't especially hard.

I am thrilled that both of these things worked. I am always happy to find neat clean and orderly ways that I can pay attention to my health without having my life revolve around food preparation. It already does to a certain extent, so as I add each new thing, I need to find more balance. I never though I would be the kind of person that makes their own stock, and yet here I am. I don't buy bouillon anymore. Not to mention the fact that half the reson I make the broth is for the tallow, which I fry alot of things in now. Using the tallow is so much better for anything beef, plus I know it can handle high heat frying. I feel like I am getting it for free!

Clever Time Saving Tricks

When I tell people about my 'little project', to get myself and the fam off processed foods as much as possible, I usually get one of two responses. Sometimes people tell me, "Oh I don't eat processed food." (More about that response later.) The other one I hear is "How are you able to stay away from the junk? How do you possibly have time? That requires so much effort."

I won't lie. It does require alot of effort. But let's face it. It is not rocket science, it is not beyond my capabilities, and I am really passionate about this. And with some proper planning it can be pretty easy. But there are a couple general rules that make it this way:

1. We are home every night. One of us at least. We have kids!! DH and I don't troll the social circuit, so we rarely have to face the 'grab-something-quick-maybe-fast-food' dilemma. We want the kids in bed at a certain time, it helps for behavior for them to be on a schedule. Because we are home so often we have alot more control over what we eat.

2. We cook. We cook every night. Take-Out has become a once or twice a month phenomenon in our house. But overall we are committed to cooking. It has become a habit, but commitment is key.

3. I bring a salad to work virtually every day. While I will go out and get some protein at a local healthy favorite City Bakery (I swear their food talks to me as I walk down the street. If you live in NY and you haven't been, you must go this weekend), I bring a salad to work almost every day. I really love salads, so it is not a terrible thing. I am not doing it to try and become a better person. I would choose a salad over a burger most days. But I have found that being in the routine of bringing a salad helps me to ensure that I get all my veggie servings in a day. Then I don't worry so much if dinner is steak and potatoes. If I don't have a good veg to go with a dinner, at least I know I had over 2 cups of greens with all kinds of raw goodies at lunch. Also salads are really easy to make. I rip up some lettuce and throw it in a tupperware, sprinkle a few croutons, chop up a carrot and an avocado if they are in season. And boom, done. I will make a big batch of dressing on the weekends and leave it in the refrigerator at work all week. You could even prep a head or two of lettuce on Sunday and have a salad mix in a large tupperware just waiting for you all week. That is a two second salad!

4. Cook on the weekends. I usually spend a couple hours each weekend cooking. I try and make a special large Sunday dinner, that we can eat leftovers or use the leftovers to make something else (glorious roast chicken becomes chicken tacos??) Then weeknight cooking is easier because as you know, I only get 10-15 minutes to bring a meal together on a weeknight.

5. Make big batches of freezable things on the weekends and freeze them in single use sizes. I will make a big batch of things I know freeze well, spaghetti sauce, soup, pesto. Then I freeze in one time use sizes so that all I have to do is grab and defrost and go. I am known for making two lasagnas at once, because it is a heck of a lot of work to make lasagna!! Make two at the same time and then freeze a whole tray. I am envious of anyone reading that has room for a separate deep freezer. I am so limited by them amount I can store. I yearn for a day when I can buy 15 pounds of local cherries in season and then freeze them and nibble on them for months down the line. My freezer is small, so I can't store alot.

6. We eat pasta once if not twice a week. I don't have an issue with carbs and I have read that pasta is a low glycemic index carb which does not raise the blood sugar as much as say white bread (does anyone care to comment??). So I don't have issues. But with Pasta you can saute any veggies lying around the house, and leftover meat, it can be a super quick catch-all-get-rid-of-the-random-stuff kind of dish.

7. Find a good grocery store. I do buy a few items premade. Croutons are a good example. But I am careful to buy my supermarket's brand because they bake the bread and they use their loaves to make croutons. I know that I am getting a fairly homemade product. Their ingredient list is short. If I were to buy a name brand, it would come with 40 ingredients and it would be sealed in a silver plastic pouch with all kind of additives to keep it fresh on the shelves for weeks before I maybe bought it. By buying the store brand (and from a local store) it may not truly local fare, but the ingredients are alot cleaner and I can purchase a ready made product without fear of contaminating additives. Grocery store chains are doing this all over the country now. If you can find a good quality chain with a small number of local stores your chances are better. Look for simple packaging. My croutons come in an open ended plastic bag with a twist tie, not packaged for a long stay on a store shelf.

8. When you are cooking on the weekends, make things that take a long time to cook, but not a long time to prep. Broth based soups are a good example. You can throw the items in a pot and walk away. The thing is--COOK ON LOW HEAT! If you cook on low heat, things take a little longer, but if you have kids, you can leave things like soup or pasta sauce or beans or strawberry jam or braised meats (pot roast?? Yum!) cooking on the stove top without fear that they will burn. Your slow cooking fare does not need to be stirred every thirty seconds. Just check on it when you need to. But otherwise, WALK AWAY and do something else.

9. Snack on things that are whole (or mostly whole) that are ready to eat, nuts, dried fruits, yogurt (not really a whole food, but definitely good for you if you are going with a plain variety), whole fruits or raw veggies. These filling snacks are packed with nutrients and require no prep time at all.

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I am sure there are others. But this is a good starter list of what we do in our house to make it through a crazy week and still make room for the foods we feel will fuel us best. Does anyone else out there have others?