(no subject)

[sacredchao]

A day of doing today. Not especially sustained or arduous doing but doing nonetheless. I returned the keys to the old flat so that's done and then continued on to Highett to buy knee pads for roller derby. They didn't have the brand I wanted in my size but they did have my second choice and those seem to be reasonable things for about the same price so I got those. $110 is not a cheap purchase but we are talking about my knees. On the way home I stopped at a supermarket and spotted kilo bags of chicken necks at a quite reasonable price which got me all inspired to cook. This has been a sticking point lately so I went with it.

Making risotto with chicken necks is a somewhat involved process that has an almost alchemical feel to it. Chicken necks are full of chickeniness but they're also full of neckiness. You want one but not the other. So necks into a pot of water for a a couple of hours on the stove to make stock at which point I chopped up a leek, threw it into my favourite cast iron pot with pepper, tasty oregano, sage, turmeric, a little cumin and a little cinnamon. I poured in a generous amout of brown rice which makes the process take longer than with other kinds of rice but which I really rather like and started spooning the stock into the rice a little at a time, thus transferring the chickeniness but not the neckiness. I love how in making risotto you're condensing flavours. The stock and the portobello mushrooms which I chopped up and threw in once I'd gone through a few ladlesful of stock just get denser and more luscious as you go and I really like the end result. So in the end all of that along with semi dried tomatos, frozen spinach and red capsicum stirred through at the end after I'd turned the heat off resulted in rich concentrated chickeniness in the rice and concentrated, chickeniness depleted neckiness in the other pot (which I threw away). A yum thing.

Also, several boxes unpacked and resolved. My room is still just as messy at this point but there is a great deal more space and I can now access the wardrobe without difficulty. I also have the room to start putting more things away and getting tidier, possibly tomorrow. Unless I get a better offer.

Comments

[vonstrassburg.livejournal.com]

The hairs on the back of my ethnicity bristle when I hear about people making chicken stock like this.

It's not chicken necks, or at least chicken necks alone. Start with a whole chicken carcass or two, they aren't hard to come by and if you shop around you can find smoked chicken carcasses. To that you add a store of bones you've been collecting from every time you've had roast chicken, plus any left-over cut-off bits including wing tips which are especially important (doubly so if the wing tips have been slightly burned from being over-cooked). Necks are a great addition, but by no means the only thing. To that you add some herbs and spices, I'd start with a bay leaf or two, a whole nutmeg (broken), one or two cinnamon sticks and a small parcel of cloves. Plus a couple of stock vegetables, a carrot of the biggest and heaviest kind you can find, along with a whole brown onion, roughly chopped including skin (remember this all gets strained out, the skin adds colour). Simmer for "some hours" not "a couple of hours". After a couple of hours you will have slightly chicken flavoured water, after some hours you will have stock. You basically want the cartilage (which is why you want whole carcasses not just necks) to mostly disintegrate.

Strain it through a common kitchen strainer, and if you want then again through some muslin. If you want to use it for consomme or summer borscht (which is clear and cold, unlike winter borscht which is lumpy) then you return the stock to the heat, break/crush an egg and throw that into the stock (including the shell), bring it back to the boil for a couple of minutes stirring all the time, and then let it cool a bit and strain again.

If you pour your stock into a plastic container and put it into the fridge it should set like hard jelly. If it doesn't set then you don't have stock.

[sacred-chao.livejournal.com]

This is much closer to how I usually do it but the supermarket happened to have necks which inspired me. "A couple" in this case was in fact closer to four and I could have let it go longer but I wanted dinner at a reasonable hour. If I plan ahead I usually get frames in the morning and let them go all day.