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Three Meal Chicken

Sometimes I overhear customers looking at our chickens and saying "they are quite expensive aren't they?". Yes, good free range chicken is a bit more per Kg than minimum standard blotting paper chicken, but the main price difference is that our chickens weigh well over 2 Kg, as opposed to the supermarket standard 1.3 Kg. A bigger chicken has had more time to develop flavour and texture. It will feed more people, or it can provide more meals. We have a regular sequence of three meals for four (two of them hungry teenagers) each time we cook a chicken.

Stock Ingredients

  • bones from the chicken
  • 1 medium onion
  • 1 carrot
  • a small bunch of parsley
  • 1 bay leaf

Meal 1 : Roast Chicken

Next day strip all the meat from the chicken carcass. Use the carcass and any reserved bones from when you ate the roast to make stock. Put all the ingredients in a pan with 1 litre of water. Bring to the boil and simmer for one hour. Do not bother skimming fat of the top: a cloudy stock with some of the fat emulsified into it is tastier and traditional with noodles.

Save about 2 oz / 50g of brown meat and scrappy bits for the soup, and use the rest to make meal 2.

Meal 2 : Chicken Gobble

(Quick chicken and rice)

To understand the name, read the recipe.

Meal 3 : Chicken Noodle Soup