My first chicken stock

Tonight I made my first homemade chicken stock while watching Dancing With the Stars. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com. It is a basic stock like the ones that I have seen on Alton Brown. I just so happened to have all of the ingredients too. After making that roasted chicken for Valentine's day, I saved the carcass to make this stock. It is very simple and doesn't look like much, but it is very tasty and I bet a lot healthier than all of those boxes that I buy. You know, I should start saving the broth from chicken when I boil it. Hmm...that's a thought. I haven't been boiling chicken lately, but when I do, I think I'll save it.

I've seen on cooking shows that the chicken broth that you buy in a box or can is very high in sodium. This recipe has only 1.5 tbsp of kosher salt for about 1.2 gallons of broth. Not bad if you ask me. I love the chicken stock I buy in a box because it's easy, but since I've been trying to thin up my waistline, I've been trying to watch my sodium intake. I don't really have a sweet tooth, but if you put a bag of beef jerky in front of me it will be gone in half an hour. I plan on freezing about 1.5 to two cups of broth per ziplock bag and then freeze it. Just a tip that I learned from Julie, if you freeze your liquids laying down, you save a ton of room in your freezer and it's easy to stack and store. Note: Make sure to use a good brand of baggie. I was unable to take advantage of this trick because my baggies started to leak.

I'm waiting for the broth to cool so that I can skim the fat off and then bag it up.

It doesn't look like much, but these carrots, onions, celery, and chicken carcass is mighty tasty.

I didn't do the final filtration step in the recipe. This is because:

1. I don't have cheese cloth
2. I'm lazy
3. For what I use chicken stock for, I don't have to worry about little bits of chicken floating around.
4. No one in our house would know the difference anyway, nor would they care.