So I’m making a chicken and vegetable stew. I make this in a Crock-Pot, and it’s super easy.
Ingredients:
- One package of white mushrooms
- One package of baby carrots
- One Vidalia or other sweet onion
- One whole celery heart
- One whole bell pepper
- A shameful amount of garlic
- One large stewing or frying hen.
- Chicken stock
- Vegetable stock
- 2 Cans of green beans
- Small to medium size red potatoes
- Optional: biscuits (see below)
- I use “Slap Ya Mamma” hot seasoning
- I’ll likely play dumb games with butter
I like to leave the mushrooms whole. In case I want more of them, I also have a left over pack of sliced white mushrooms. They take significantly less time to cook, so they are perfect to leave until the end. In the Crock-Pot, I season and place the bird down first, breast up. I have typically put potatoes down first, but as I think about it, I want the chicken to cook and break down in its own juices, and the chicken is huge. At a certain point, you’re just trying to get everything in there.
With the bird in, I wedge those potatoes in there. They can kind of help hold the bird in place. The rest of my vegetables have been blended together in a bowl because I went back and forth on how to set this up about 54 times. That’s perfect though. I take scooping handfuls of these diced up and whole vegetables and shove them into every nook and cranny around the bird and the pot. Eventually, the pot is stuffed to the lid. In fact, the lid is sort of not sealing to the pot.
I’m not too concerned about the lid sealing to the pot. I intend to cook this down throughout the day. As the stuff in the pot cooks, it will shrink a bit and render into liquid. The vegetable renderings will drip through the chicken into the chicken renderings. Bruh. As that process happens, the solid mass will shrink inside the pot and the lid will come the rest of the way down. I have the two stocks on standby to add more liquid if needed. I was only able to get one can of green beans and six of my eight potatoes in there right now. I’ll get the rest in once it cooks down.
I ought to add butter on that ingredient list, because I may straight up sneak a stick or two’s worth of butter into that pot for the hell of it. If that’s wrong, then I don’t want to be right.
In several hours, once everything is cooked, I’ll remove the bird to a walled dish. Not a cutting board, but a dish. There, I will de-bone and de-skin the bird. Stewing/frying birds are Galina’s, and the packaging explicitly says to remove the skin. No skin off my nose… Once the bird is relieved of its bones and skin, it goes back into the pot. The amount of liquid is controlled this entire time by the vegetable and chicken stock. I have both because I couldn’t make up my mind and it was buy one, get one.
Now, if you want to get crazy, go pick up a pack of those biscuits in a paper tube. Once the stew is done, take a couple of ladles worth of liquid and pinch some marble size portions of dough and cook it in a pan. Dumplings. The dough also thickens that liquid into a fantastic gravy to go with the solid parts of the stew. I suppose if you don’t want to try the dumplings, but do want thicker liquid, you could just add some flour to the stew once the bird has been returned. Just make sure you add it s slowly and avoid lumps.
And that’s it. The whole house will smell like chicken and vegetable stew. I’ll be so damned hungry by the time it finishes that me and the dog will be snapping at each other. She may get just a little bit. If she’s good.