Stone Soup

The chicken in my freezer was starting to guilt trip me.

"Pasta? You're having pasta tonight. Sure, pasta seems awfully heavy, but then what do I know, I'm only a chicken."

"Oh no, don't mind me, I'll be fine all by myself, here in the freezer. In the dark. With the half empty bag of frozen peas."

"You know, it's always so nice when you drop by, even if it's only to refill the ice trays. Oh, you're leaving? OH... ::sigh:: Well goodbye."

And then I realized I was anthropomorphizing a roaster, and that it was time to put both of us out of our misery. So I carted my chicken out to Cambridge, along with a couple of potatoes, some onions, and a bag of carrots, and made an old fashioned dinner for myself and a couple of friends. Roast chicken is a neat trick. You spend all of 15 minutes actually working. Toss the carrots and potatoes in the bottom of the pan. Clean up the bird and stuff it with onions and apples. Give it a little TLC with some butter and some salt and pepper. Then you stick it in the oven for an hour and forget about it. Drink some beer and spend the better part of the evening telling dirty jokes and hilariously racy anecdotes, which is exactly what I did until dinner was done cooking itself. (And I found that if you cook the chicken at a relatively low temperature and then crank the oven to about 450 for the last 15 or 20 minutes, the meat stays juicy and tender, while the skin browns and crisps up beautifully. Tasty and gorgeous.) The whole shebang looks very impressive when it comes out of the oven--starch, meat, and veggies all sitting pretty in one pretty little package. It gets great reaction, but the fact of the matter is, it takes significantly less effort than most of the simple pasta dishes I count as a part of my regular repertoire.

But the best part is the leftovers. No, not the cold chicken sandwiches you make up for lunch the next day (And lets be real, the boys and I picked that chicken to the bone with our bare fingers, and there are no sandwich fixings to be found here). No, I'm talking about the sad, meatless carcass that I carted home on the train at 11:00 at night in a lunch box. And yes I am aware that carrying what is essentially food garbage with me while riding public transportation might make me a crazy person. But I was on a mission. Stock.

This afternoon I dropped that scrawny, naked chicken carcass in a stock pot, along with some sautéed onions, celery and carrots, and a handful of herbs, and I waited. I really love this process. I love that it takes all afternoon. I love that it feels a little bit like stone soup--how out of some bones, and whatever else you've got lying around you somehow create magic. It's like alchemy. And I especially love that out of the supposedly inedible remnants of one very nice meal with friends, I have suddenly created the basis for dozens of others. I spend the whole afternoon fantasizing about the dishes I'll make. Next weekend, Parmesan risotto. Maybe I can try my hand at Ratatouille, and then watch the movie with Mr. Gastro while we eat it. And in the fall, when the first chill rolls in, I can pull the last of the stock out of the depths of my freezer and make chicken soup from scratch, a project I pass up more often than not exactly because I don't have any chicken stock already in the house. Now I'll have no excuse. Now, every time I open my freezer I'll see nothing but endless opportunities to create exciting new dishes, sitting there waiting, right next to the frozen peas.