Adventures in Cooking: Lime and Cilantro Chicken Stock
Posted by: matt, in Cooking, Food, LifeIn our house cooking the chicken and making stock generally falls on my shoulders. I don’t mind at all - I thoroughly enjoy it. Making stock is a really liberating experience for me.
I’m one of those very focused, engineer types who can cook most things that there’s a recipe for, but don’t you dare ask me to improvise or deviate from the recipe - except for chicken stock.
Chicken stock is really cool stuff. You just start with a basic recipe (chicken, carrots, celery, garlic, etc) and then you can change it up as you see fit. From what I can tell, it’s hard to make a bad chicken stock. It’s the one cooking area where I don’t need a recipe. I just throw some stuff together and wing it.
Now, some of you may be wondering, “Yeah, that’s cool, I get it…but Lime and Cilantro?” Well, we cooked “Mexican-Style Lime and Cilantro Whole Chicken”[1] in the slow cooker and had soft tacos for dinner tonight. I always make stock from the carcass and I was looking at this thinking “Man, I’d really like to make stock…but this’ll have a funny flavor…”.
Then it hit me - I’ll accentuate the lime and cilantro flavors and we’ll use it as a base for Tortilla Soup and other soups like that! So, in addition to the onion, carrots and celery I usually put in the stock, I threw in the lime rind and cilantro we cooked in the cavity of the bird. Also, I tossed in some additional cilantro and a couple dried chilies.
I’m hoping it turns out well and will be another step along the path of free-form cooking. We’ve already got a Tortilla Soup recipe picked out (slow cooker one, from the same cookbook) and we’ll be making it on Tuesday.
I’ll be sure to let you all know how it turns out.
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January 30th, 2006 at 8:57 am
Mmmm, that sounds wonderful. I really should pick up that book sometime. Does it have a number of 8-10 hour recipes? Except on the weekends those are the only slow cooker ones I can do since we are away from home on an average of 10 hours on the weekdays.
Val
January 30th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Yes, there’s definitely a bunch of 8-10 hour recipes. I just paged through it during lunch and saw ones for soups, beans and meat (beef mostly) dishes. Another option is to use a timer on the slow cooker (like you would use for Christmas lights to make them turn on and off automatically) or get a slow cooker with a built in timer (we got one of those for Christmas this year). The built in timer is pretty neat because it switches to keep warm once the time runs out.
Amber checked the cookbook out from the library to test drive it before she bought it. It’s a really nice way to do it if your library system has it available.
Another neat thing we cook from the cookbook is breakfast cereal. We’ve got a small 6 cup slow cooker that we can throw oatmeal or other grains in at night and have them ready to eat in the morning.
-Matt
January 30th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Hmm, the thing about the timer is then wouldn’t whatever meat we had in there be siting out for a few hours? If only they had a ‘cooling’ option. Or mayhap I should just invest in a neat one with a warming option like you guys. What a great feature!
Valerie