4 lbs whole chicken legs, skin removed.

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

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

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.

Mmmm... bowl o' chicken...

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.

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.

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

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.

Now that you have learned how to make chicken and dumplings, please be sure to view these other chicken recipes.