Chicken Stock (with Feet!)

When a toddler is awake and on the go all day Sunday what with grandparents, Mass, a Latin choir concert, and a celebratory dinner at a restaurant, the end result is that she crashes asleep for the night at 6:45 p.m. And the effect of that, all you mamas can guess: she woke us up at 4:00 a.m. rearin' to go! The baby wasn't far behind her.

So, what with my having been wakened and not able to go back to sleep, I couldn't make lemonade out of lemons, but I could make stock out of chicken feet. Which is almost as good, right?

I'm trying to cook with chicken stock instead of water for a nutritional boost, and I'm trying to make my own stock rather than buy it to get a much bigger nutritional boost.

Roasting the bones before six in the morning

I can buy chicken "back and neck bundles" from the local farms for $2 each (one pack is two bundles, as above, about three pounds).

I can also buy chicken feet for $2 for ten feet! Why chicken feet? They revolt our modern sensibilities but are a traditional food used by tons of Asian and Jewish mamas in the kitchen, and many others world over, I would imagine. A zillion grandmas can hardly be wrong.

And lest we be too horrified, where do we think gelatin comes from? Except for the most philosophically pure vegetarians and vegans, most people cheerfully eat cherry Jell-o, which is basically gelatin extracted from animal connective tissue combined with red food coloring and several cups of sugar. Yum yum!

I read some articles about how to make stock using chicken feet and this humorous one best captured how I was feeling at this prospect. I had thought that when I ordered chicken feet, they would arrive in such a way that I could don latex gloves, close my eyes, pick the up gingerly, and drop them in the pot. No such luck!

I read some more articles (here and here) as well as consulting a friend, who helped calm me from my hyperventilating. I don't think I processed the feet quite perfectly because the yellow skins didn't just slip off. I really had to work at it, so I suspect I did something slightly wrong, but practice will make perfect.

I could have made stock using only chicken stock and it would have been a thick gel, but I decided to make stock using the back and neck bundles with just two feet thrown in for some gelatin. My friend told me of her practice: she processes the feet, then freezes them on a cookie tray before storing them frozen in a bag. When she makes stock, she just grabs a couple feet and tosses them in. That is the method I am trying!

The stock will be frozen till needed

The final result was four quarts of broth, probably costing me less than 75 cents each, as compared to several dollars each to buy lower nutritional quality at the store. It's not often that the healthier, homemade food costs less, so yay for us!