No-Fuss Chicken Stock

It's been different here, having taken Hannah 400 miles away to college and now just having one child here at home.  We've been back a week and I think I mostly spent the week in a fog, recovering from the intensity of the "college drop-off" (all the emotion, the getting ready, the last minute shopping for items that were forgotten, the move in, etc) and trying to get started with a bit of a homeschooling routine.

I expected spend this weekend seriously weeding and rehabilitating the summer heat and drought ravaged garden, but have ended up with our 3 year old granddaughter spending the weekend with us.  She's still asleep this morning (having not settled down until 11:00 last night), and we are having a very welcome gentle steady rainy morning.  So, with my gardening plans gone awry, I decided to make some no fuss chicken stock.

Whenever I roast a chicken or buy an already roasted chicken from Costco, after we eat or pull off as much of the meat as we can, I like to make stock from the remaining carcass.  Often I don't have the time or the desire to deal with it that night (especially if we are eating one from Costco -- generally means I am too busy to cook one myself, or in the summer time because it's just to hot and I'm not thinking about soup and such).  I simply put the carcass in a ziplock bag and stash it in the freezer.

I had two carcasses squirreled away, so I pulled them out of the freezer, put them still frozen in my stock pot, filled the pot with water, added some "parsley sage rosemary and thyme", some salt and pepper, a bit of vinegar to draw out the calcium from the bones, and set it to simmer for a couple of hours.  I COULD have added some chopped onion, celery, carrots -- but I didn't feel like messing with chopping.  Remember, this is NO FUSS chicken stock.

After a couple of hours, I drained out the liquid and put it in the fridge so the fat rises to the top and can simply be lifted off.  When the solids cooled, I recovered about a cup of meat that can be added back in for soup.

Now I have stock to make some soup tomorrow, stock for the freezer for future use, and even cubes of stock frozen in an ice cube tray, which I then pop into a freezer bag and can get whenever I just need a few tablespoons or half cup of stock.