Food on Friday

Is everyone waiting with baited breath for today's recipe? I thought so!!! Haha ;-)

I have three or four favorite cookbooks. Today's recipe is adapted from one of them: The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking. You MUST buy this cookbook!!! I am a southern girl, so that is what drew me to it initially, but even if you are a yankee or from anywhere else, you will grow to love these simple but so satisfying recipes :)

Ever heard of Chicken and Dumplings???

You can do this! I promise it isn't too hard. Promise!! Plus your house will smell amazingly cozy :)

Here are the ingredients:
1 whole chicken
2 quarts + 1/4 cup of water
2-3 Tbs cornstarch + water for dissolving
2 tsp salt
2 cups of flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup shortening
2 tsp black pepper

SEE, you probably have most or all of these ingredients already in your house!

In a big stockpot, dump the 2 quarts of water and dunk the chicken (I also added a carrot, a celery, and a whole garlic clove for broth flavor). On medium high heat, cook until done, about 1 hour (if you use a bigger chicken- 6+ lbs, you might need to cook it a little longer, but a 3-4 lb one will be done in an hour). Remove the chicken (and vegetables if you added them) from the pot, reserving the chicken broth. Go take your dog(s) for a walk while the chicken cools. When you get back, remove the skin, and get the meat off the bones (this will not take as long as you think, because the meat will be so tender, but it will probably take you about 15 minutes). Cut the chicken into bite size pieces, and put as much chicken back into the broth as you like (I made a 7ish lb chicken for this, and I probably got 7 or 8 cups of chicken off the thing... so I put 2-3 cups back into the broth and was still able to freeze 5 cups!). It is totally up to you how chickened your broth is!!

Over medium heat, bring the chicken broth back to a slow boil/simmer. In a little bowl, dissolve/wisk the cornstarch + water and dump it into the broth to make it more gravy-ish. (If you don't like gravy-ish, then you can skip this step!)

To make the dumplings, combine the flour and salt in a medium bowl. Cut the shortening in with a fork or pastry blender. Add the 1/4 cup of water to the mixture and mix with your hands to form a dough. You can either do drop dumplings (just pinched off dough), or you can roll the dough out (my favorite), and use a knife or ravioli cutter to cut little dumpling squares. YUM.

Drop the dumplings into the slow-boiling chicken broth, gently stirring. Add the pepper. (In the interest of full disclosure, the actual recipe calls for adding a stick of melted butter at this point, too (misfit, I know you'll like that part!), but I don't use the butter.)

Turn the heat to low and let it simmer for as long as it takes the dumplings to cook- about 15 minutes or so.

Eat up! You have to let me know if you try this!!