Using the Whole Chicken

[Winger Ed.]

, livers got tossed.

.....Get a rope...

No, wait,,,,,, burn the witch!!!

[dverna]

i like my rice white.

You damn Yooper racist...LOL

[Lloyd Smale]

You damn Yooper racist...LOL

my wife thinks so

[Lloyd Smale]

What a good thread. I am 71 and my folks lived through the Depression and tough times. We did not eat fancy, but we ate well, and my mom was a fantastic cook. People who don't have it easy make do.

Not chicken soup, but my mom would buy chicken livers because they were cheap. Fry them up with onions, peppers and a bit of garlic....YUM YUM YUM. Come inside after shoveling snow and chow down a plate of the stuff with real bread to sop up the juices.

I bet 98% of folks under 40 have never had chicken livers.

im not much on eating innards. My dad loves liver kidneys heart ect. He said growing up his ma had them all (9 kids) convinced because they were smaller they were treats for special occasions. Sometimes they were only for his dad. He said butcher day for large animals was almost like Christmas because for while there was guts to share with the whole family. Even up to the last when he shot a deer the first things he ate was the heart and liver.

[BJK]

We make our own dog food too, about 5 gallons at a time. Thighs are the easiest to debone after 3+ hours of being boiled. Then we add the rest of the ingredients, sweet potato, oats, all sorts of stuff. Our vet says keep doing what we're doing. No tartar in the mouth of our 11 year old dog. I'd add livers but my wife can't stand the smell.

I would walk home from school for lunch and mom would many times have chicken livers, onions and eggs waiting for me. Good eatin'! Many times she'd cook up fricasseed hearts and gizzards. More good eatin'! I haven't had that in 50 years.

[MaryB]

Mom would S&P then flour the chicken livers then pan fry in butter... crispy buttery good eats!

[Winger Ed.]

Mom would S&P then flour the chicken livers then pan fry in butter... crispy buttery good eats!

Some of the 'chicken shack' places near the inner city sell fried livers.
When I found myself in those neighborhoods, I get the big order of them and a family size order of fried okra.

I could eat them until I got sick.
The resulting gas was no big deal when I was still single, but now days I'd have to sleep in the yard.

[MT Gianni]

YOU TOSSED THE LIVERS ?!!!!!??!?!?!??

GREAT GOD AMIGHTY !!!!

My GrandMother's, Mother and all the Aunt's and Uncles would spin in their graves if I did such a thing. We have one of those secret Family recipes for Chopped Chicken Liver that makes My mouth water right now just thinking about it.

I stopped eating liver after a talk with my Dr. It has the highest amount of cholesterol of any meat. Other organ meats are high but liver is 2-3 times what hearts are.

[country gent]

Several bars here had deep fried livers on the menu, they would marinate bread and deep fry them.Very good

[MaryB]

Bars here were all pickled gizzards... never understood the attraction to them... vinegar soaked hunk of pencil eraser...

[Rapier]

I grew up in the Glades on a ranch on lake Okachobee. Nothing goes to waste on a farm or ranch. Did not have much in the way of noodles but plenty of flour and rice.
It is amazing to me how many young people today can not cook, never taught or never wanted to learn.

[Winger Ed.]

It is amazing to me how many young people today can not cook, never taught or never wanted to learn.

My sister was like that when she was young.
At a family gathering, she said something about how she never learned to cook much.
Mom said she tried to teach her numerous times.
Sis said, "Yeah, and I tried not to watch".

[jonp]

I'm not sure how many others do this these days, but every time I roast a whole chicken I make a pot of stock and use it to make chicken noodle soup.

Tonight I roasted a smallish chicken for dinner and now have a big pot of chicken noodle soup simmering on the stove. The smell in the house is amazing. Making the stock, I threw in some black peppercorns, a couple of bay leaves, and sprinkled some Lowry's seasoning salt in it. After I pulled out all the bones, the bay leaves, and all the peppercorns I could find, I diced up some Yukon gold potatoes, Alaskan carrots, celery, and one onion. For noodles, my family likes the wide egg noodles instead of fettuccini or similar.

I recognize that people did this in the past during hard times to make the most of what they had, however, I just love doing it.

It beats the heck out of the canned stuff!

Pretty close but I use Crazy Janes Salt and garlic. Lot's of garlic as I love it.

[jaysouth]

When you cook a whole chicken, pick the bones clean and brown in the oven with some onions and carrots. Cover with water and add meat scraps, bay leaf and peppercorns. Simmer for 4-5 hours. Freeze in serving size containers for future use.

My daughter buys two whole chickens at Aldi every week and boils them with two pounds of rice. Then she adds two cans of unsweetened pumpkin. She picks the meat off and mixes in the rice and pumpkin. It feeds her two dogs for a week. They do not have to be coaxed to eat.

[Noah Zark]

Count me in with the soup makin's crowd; it's been customary in my family to make "turkey carcass soup" on Thanksgiving, and "ham soup" at Christmas and Easter. Great Depression carryover behavior, along with washing sheets of tinfoil for re-use, and keeping a can of bacon lard on the back of the stove. But I digress.

I take all of the roaster pan drippings, the turkey carcass (except the neck and sline bones; i hate fishing them out), and add chicken broth and water and simmer for a couple-few hours. I let it cool overnight either ohtside or in the garage if its </= 40F, then skim most of the hardened fat the next day, reheating, and adding vegetables, spices, noodles, and barley. It always all disappears.

For the ham soup, I again start with the pan drippings which themselves started as a mix of 1.5 cups orange juice and 1/2 cup brown sugar that was heated in the MW to melt the brown sugar, then gets poured over the ham after shallow crosshatch cutting the meat top and bottom. The sugar/ juice mix gets trapped in the cuts and adds flavor, and takes up ham juice flavor during reheating the precooked ham.

To those pan drippings I add diced "end cuts" of the ham, and maybe another diced 3/8" - 1/2" thick slice or two, a large can of tomato sauce, and two large cans of crushed tomatoes with juice, ground clove, a bay leaf or three, and let that simmer a few hours, adding water to maintain level. Then in goes elbow macaroni and barley, sometimes with cubed potatoes, sometimes with a can or two of Goya black beans. Continue simmering until the noodles are soft and hydrated, serve. My youngest hates tomatoes but manages to Hoover up her share of ham soup, and there's never any that gets tossed away either.

Noah

[gbrown]

Yeah, I have 6 or 7 quarts of chicken broth in the freezer. Every time I boil a chicken, or get a rotisserie one, save the carcass, use trimmings from green onions, a carrot, the trimmings from celery, and some dried green peppers and boil it up. Pour thru a sieve into quarts and cool and freeze. Gumbo base, chicken and noodles, chicken pot pie, and the list goes on.

[Bmi48219]

I stopped eating liver after a talk with my Dr. It has the highest amount of cholesterol of any meat.

We used to butcher a hog every year in early spring. The liver got sliced up and roasted medium rare over a wood fire before we were finished cleaning up. A massive infusion of cholesterol once in a while isn’t too bad.

[MaryB]

The body needs some cholesterol for proper brain function!

[jonp]

The body needs some cholesterol for proper brain function!

Thats why Vegans are so crazy MaryB. You need fat in your diet

[BJK]

Dittos. Folks wintered in and eating rabbit for meat would go insane since rabbit is so low in fat, it's called cabin fever. Once they start to consume fats they return to normal (I think).

I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail, but we've been lied to about fats and LDL and HDL. I started to study it due to heart disease. Common knowledge is dead wrong on the subject. Lied to by agencies we are supposed to be able to trust. But politics and the $ have corrupted the people who we are supposed to be able to trust. Who are they? The FDA, the Heart Assoc', food companies, the media (yeah I know, what a surprise that the media would lie). But the truth is out there if you dig.