A Chicken in Every Pot

    

     I dutifully saved the chicken carcass after serving up my favorite Tuscan meal Wednesday evening, Pollo Arrosto al Limone.  It would be a crime to waste all that wonderful flavor left on the bones and in the skin.  But in the past my chicken soup always tasted anemic, flat and flavorless and I couldn't understand why.  After all, I boiled the left over chicken with carrots, celery and onions and usually threw in a cup or two of wild rice after adding some sage and thyme.  But time after time it was lackluster, tasting more like dishwater than soup.

    
     Thinking about it I realized my failure was that I did not spend adequate time building layers of flavor.  I just put all the ingredients in the pot and boiled it for about 3 hours, until there was absolutely no flavor left: not in the chicken, not in the carrots, and certainly not in the swollen and soggy rice.

     So this morning I took on an entirely new approach.  I constructed the soup one layer at a time, beginning by making a vegetable stock of cut up carrots, celery, onion and garlic and simmering it with several bay leaves.  And as an added bonus I discovered some parsley stems I had stashed away in a plastic bag in the freezer for just such an occasion and included them in with the water.  Partially covered, the pot simmered away for nearly an hour.  Then I strained out the aromatics which had by that time released all their flavor into the stock.  Into the pot I put the carcass as I siphoned off just enough liquid to cook up the wild rice in a separate sauce pan.  Since the chicken was already cooked it didn't need to stay covered in the pot for long, just long enough to lend some flavor to the vegetable stock.  As the rice was absorbing the liquid I picked through the bones to get every last morsel of meat and shredded it as well as chopping up some of the meat already cut off the roast the night before and refrigerated.  The second layer of flavor had been built.

     The final layer of the chicken rice soup was completed when I added the chicken meat and the cooked rice to the warm stock.  All I needed to do was to fine tune the taste with a little pepper, parsley and thyme.  What a difference!  For the first time in my life I had a chicken soup that I was proud to claim as my own.  All the natural flavors of every ingredient was present and accounted for. 

     I savored my accomplishment with a bowlful for lunch.  When one of my favorite TV programs from antiquity would end each week, the Colonel on the A-TEAM would say, "I love it when a plan comes together."  And so do I.