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Chicken stock day!

How to make good chicken stock:

Chicken parts - enough to fill your largest pot

Cold water - enough to cover the chicken parts

Optional:
Onion - 1 whole
Celery - 1 to 2 stalks
Carrot - 1 to 2 whole
Bay - 1 to 2 leaves
Thyme - 1 small bunch with leaves or just the picked stems
Parsley - 1 small bunch with leaves or just the picked stems

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- Save your chicken bits in the freezer for awhile. Enough to fill up your stock pot. They can be roasted or raw.

- Cover the chicken parts in cold water

- Bring up to heat, almost to the point where it wants to boil, DO NOT LET IT BOIL.

- Turn the stove down as far as possible without turning it off.

- Let the chicken parts steep, uncovered for 2 - 3 hours

- Add onion, celery, carrot, bay, thyme, parsley. For this whole pot I only added 1/3rd onion, 1 carrot and 2 small sticks of celery because I would like it to taste like chicken, not vegetables. Note again that the vegetables are completely optional AND customizable. I like adding a couple juniper berries and one very small crushed clove of garlic sometimes.

- Allow to steep, uncovered for 5 - 6 more hours.

- Resist all urges to touch/stir/jostle the stock.

- Do not add more liquid, it is supposed to evaporate. If you've lost a whole bunch of liquid, then you probably have the heat on too high.

- You can let the stock steep for more than 8 hours if you desire. This one went for about 10. The longer is goes, the more wonderful will come out, and maybe you will even get lucky and make chicken glace, which you can eat with a fork once it's cool.

- Once it has steeped to your liking, remove as much of the junk from the pot as possible (that is what the tongs are for).

- Strain into another large vessel and find a way to ice it down quickly. I put three blue picnic ice coolers in a plastic bag and set them in.

- DO NOT PUT HOT STOCK DIRECTLY IN THE ICE BOX. You will ruin your other food that way and it can cause foodborne illness.

- Package your stock for freezer storage, so that you might make delicious soop later on.

You need:

New potatoes (or Anya potatoes if you prefer)
Fennel
Mint
Chives
Fresh oregano
4 lemons
Olive oil
Whole grain mustard
1 medium clove of garlic
salt & pepper

You can also add in roast squash or sweet potato if you want a change.

I use about a bag and a half of new potatoes (so about 25-30 total).

Get the spuds, chop them in half or quarters - you want them about an inch and a half cubed. Boil them, take them off the heat once you can get a knife in them easily and stick them in the pan in the sink under running cold water, keep it running on them until they've cooled down a bit and stopped cooking otherwise they go flakey and you want them waxy for this. Leave them in the cold water for 5 mins then drain.

Take the top and bottom off the fennel, clean it, chop in to small pieces about 5-10mm cubed. Chop the chives and mint, you can use as much of this as you've got - a packet of each from Sainsbury's as a minimum. I added some fresh oregano because my pot-plant needed a trim but it's not essential! Could also work nicely with fresh thyme or flat leaf parsley.

Make the dressing by juicing your 4 lemons. Stick that in a jam jar or anything with a screw top. Bung in two big heaped teaspoons of grain mustard, some salt & pepper, the clove of garlic crushed, the same amount of oil as lemon juice and shake it. Taste it. If the lemon is too strong stick some more oil in. Add another teaspoon of mustard if the garlic is too strong.

Stick the potatoes in a bowl, stick the fennel and herbs on top, stick the dressing on top of that. Mix it very well with your hands and store in the fridge. It's good if you can leave it for an hour or so before eating because the potatoes will soak up the dressing!

Also, this will keep quite well as long as the potatoes cooled fast enough and they're quite fresh. Two days maximum, but you could do the night before if you're serving lunch the next day without any issues.