Ingredients: |
Ingredients: 3 medium sized chickens. Whole chickens are fine, just take out the little paper wrapped package of assorted parts, that's just a joke from the guys in the chicken packing plant. If you're not into peeling the chicken off the bones later, use 2 or 3 packages of boneless, skinless chicken breasts.
5 or 6 cans of double strength chicken broth. Not powdered bouillon, not those little blocks that don't dissolve in anything. If you knew how much salt was in that stuff, you'd dehydrate. You need enough broth to cover the chicken (adding the 5 or 6 cans of water to bring it down to regular strength.) The more water you have to add, the less chickeny the stuff will taste.
Bisquik
Milk (or water if you are out)
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Directions: |
Directions:A long time ago, when I was a kid, my great-grandmother would spend all afternoon creating Chicken and Dumplings. It was a real time consuming affair, involving knowing what part of the chicken was what and how much fat to add to the flour...too complicated for me. So I never learned anything but how to cut out the dumplings. Many, many years later, I wanted chicken and dumplings, but the stuff in the cans is totally gross and none of the restaurants I go to make it as good as Nannie. I figured, how hard could this be? Chicken and boiled bread. I checked a couple of recipe books, but those were too complicated, and seemed to involve a lot of vegetables that you know I don't like. So, I simplified the whole process.
I always fix enough for a small army, so normal people may want to cut the recipe a little. This amount serves 8-10 normal size people.
Bring the chicken to a boil, make sure you are using a really big pot. Cook over medium heat for 45 minutes to an hour. After the chicken is cooked, remove it to a pan to cool. If you've done it right, the chicken should be falling off the bone. Make sure you get ALL of the bones out of the broth. Leave the chicken to cool off, otherwise you'll burn your fingers pulling it off the bone.
Dumplings are simple. Put bisquick in bowl and add milk. Exact measurements are not important here. 3 or 4 cups of Bisquick and a couple splashes of milk at a time. The dough should be the consistency of bread dough, pizza dough, or play dough. Sprinkle some Bisquick all over it and roll it out real thin. The thinner the better, but at least down to ¼ inch thick. Don't try to roll out the whole batch at one time. After its rolled out, slice into squares (or rectangles, or trapezoids or parallelograms, whatever). Use a pizza wheel for speed.
The most important thing is that you bring the broth back to a rolling boil. The next most important thing is that you drop these suckers in ONE at a time. Keep dropping them in, stirring occasionally, gently so you don't bash the dumplings into wallpaper paste. If you have to stop to roll out more dumplings and cut them, cut the heat back to low. If you have more broth than dumplings, make some more. If you have more dumplings than broth, add a little water. Don't add more than a cup or two, though, because you'll be watering down the flavor. After you've dropped all the dumplings, cut the heat back.
Strip the chicken off the bones, dropping the meat into the dumpling pot. This will take a little time, so don't call everybody to dinner yet. Now is a good time to start heating up a couple cans of carrots or potatoes or corn.
To recap this recipe, since it looks a lot more complicated that it really is...Boil some chicken, take it out of the broth, make some dumplings with Bisquick and milk, roll them out thin and cut them, drop one at a time into boiling broth, put the chicken back in without the bones. Simple. |
This recipe for Chicken and Dumplings is from