Poached Chicken and Stock

I love to cook but find it hard to cook for only one person. So I find that I expend a lot of energy cooking many things in 1 day to get ready for the coming week or so. Lately I've been on a salad kick and like to use chicken as my protein of choice. The past few weeks I've baked chicken breasts but with having to make the Pho, I thought having chicken stock on had would be nice as well. So poached it was.

 

For chicken this week, I used a 4lb bag of frozen chicken thighs. I just put them in the pot (still frozen) and added water to cover the chicken. To make the stock more flavorful, I added an onion, celery, carrots, garlic cloves, lemon, salt, pepper. Then bring to a boil, turn down the heat to let the pot simmer uncovered. To poach these from frozen, I cooked the chicken for about 45 minutes.

Take the chicken out of the pot and set aside to cool. Also take out all the solids from the pot with a slotted spoon. Strain the stock into a bowl and set aside. 

Now I took this the extra mile and took the chicken bones (after I shredded the chicken and discarded the skin) and boiled them with salt, pepper, bay leaf, carrot and celery. I brought this to a boil and simmered this uncovered for about 2 hours. By doing this, the collagen in the joints have melted into the stock. Then I strained this and put it with the other stock. 

The stock goes into the refrigerator overnight. Once the stock is cold, the fat will rise to the top and solidify. Skim off the fat, and if you did it right, it will be a little jiggly.

Yummy, homemade chicken stock for soups, or really anything else you need stock for. The nice thing about stock is that you just throw in what you have in the fridge in the pot. It really doesn't matter what you put in it but the more veggies you put in it, the better it will taste!