Chicken and Dumplings

Ingredients:

With the end of football season upon us, I was faced with the odd feeling of a Sunday without hours of watching football and drinking beer. It's cold outside, so it's perfect to make chicken and dumplings.

Keep in mind I've made this a handful of times, so any suggestions or horrified comments are appreciated.

3.5 qts water, brought to a rolling boil
1 tsp. salt (I used kosher)

Step 1:

4 lbs whole chicken legs, skin removed.

Step 2:

Using your knife cut up:

2 and a half smaller carrots, sliced
2 celery stalks (be sure to save the leaves), sliced
1 shallot, roughly sliced
1/2 large yellow onion (not pictured: I had to run to the store)
2 cloves garlic, quartered
1/2 tsp. dried parsley (not pictured)
1 bay leaf

Step 3:

Toss the stuff in, and it won't look very pretty at first:

Step 4:

Let simmer, uncovered, for two hours. Here's a look after an hour:

After two hours, remove chicken and set aside. Fish around with a large slotted spoon to make sure you don't miss any delicious meat.

Step 5:

Mmmm... bowl o' chicken...

Step 6:

Strain the broth and toss out the veggies. Here's my fancy setup:

My broth yield was about 6 quarts, or 8 cups.

Return broth to stockpot and let simmer. Add:
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. black pepper
I didn't have the lemon juice so I didn't add any.

Step 7:

While that's going on, make you some dumplings:
2 cups King Arthur bread flour (I didn't have All-Purpose or even cake flour, but this seemed to work really well)
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1 and a quarter tsp. salt
1 cup and 2 Tbsp. milk

The dough was really, really sticky...
so I ended up adding about 1/4 more of a cup of flour.

Mix together in a bowl, and be sure to not handle the dough too much. The less you rough it up, the lighter and fluffier your dumplings will be. Let sit for 5-10 minutes.

Step 8:

Flatten out and cut into strips and then into 1/2 inch squares. I highly recommend a dough scraper.

Step 9:

After your chicken has cooled, take out all bones, cartilage, and other weirdly hard parts and shred into bite-sized pieces. Add in.

Set aside as many dumplings as you think you'll eat when you make it, then drop the dumplings one-by-one into the mix. They should float to the top.

It looks a little yellow, that's just because of my stove light.

I don't have a pretty little bowl shot with some parsley sprigs as garnish, sorry!

This yields about 5-6 servings (1 bowl). Approximate cost per serving: $2, and that's being generous.

For those of you living on your own or with one other person:

I separated the leftovers into tupperware containers and froze individually. The dumplings were placed on a baking sheet and frozen, then separated into ziplock bags to go with each individual serving.