Bone Broth

Lately I've been on a cooking kick, stemming from the improvement I've made in seasoning eggs. 

It may seem silly but I've always avoided salt and pepper completely. In college, when I started eating healthier and learning about nutrition, I thought it was best to not get a taste for salt. Because heart disease. Ha!

It's funny now but I was really into putting only the healthiest things in my body. I had already quit Dr Pepper, high fructose corn syrup, and partially hydrogenated oils. I paid close attention to food labels and made sure I was getting enough fiber and protein each day. 

I don't think it's a bad thing to pay attention to your food but for a personality like mine, it can also veer into unhealthy territory- like counting calories and not eating until the specific time allotment for those calories was up... I read somewhere that I needed 100 calories and hour so if I had eaten 400 calories for breakfast, I wouldn't eat for another 4 hours even if I was hungry. Not a good idea!

Once I gave up sugar for 2 weeks (it ended on Valentine's Day and I had cookies and hot chocolate for breakfast....I don't think it worked); and another time I went vegan and gluten free for 2 weeks which coincidentally also ended on Valentine's Day. I was feeling so amazing at the end of those 2 weeks that I ate hummus and veggies for dinner on me and Bean's date- I was afraid I would feel sick if I ate something less clean.

My ultimate goal is a combination of the two. If it were up to me I would eat only veggies and seafood with the occasional meat- I'm imagining days full of ceviche and sushi and roasted veggies. Problem is I like sweets. And I have a family that loves bread and cheese. 

So I'm splitting the difference by incorporating healthy things into foods we all like.

Bean and I decided that he eats food if it tastes good and I eat food if it's healthy for me, even if it doesn't taste that great.

The baby broke out in eczema and I noticed it improved (and so did her sleep) when I gave up dairy. It was hard at first but when I let little bits of it sneak into my diet now, to test the waters, I notice that my stomach is upset. So I'm going to keep up the no dairy for myself. 

I made chicken and dumplings from scratch without any dairy- I boiled the chickens from scratch which gave me lots of extra chicken stock; picked them clean, and made dumplings from scratch without any dairy- the sauce thickened up with just the flour from the dumplings. It came out pretty decent! I like mine with lots of pepper. 

Side note on the no dairy rule- I haven't had an issue with butter or mayo which is such a relief! Mayo is mostly eggs and butter is surprisingly allowed on the No FODMAP diet (yet another diet I went on at the request of a GI doctor- which is also where I discovered my lactose intolerance); so I decided to keep it in and haven't seen any issues with the baby. 

The next week I boiled another chicken and made mini chicken pot pies using crescent rolls (dairy free) as the crust. I used unsweetened almond milk in place of milk and these came out so great that Bean exclaimed, "Yum!" when he took a bite. We froze the extras and have eaten them a few times since then. 

There's nothing I love more than pulling something I made out of the freezer for an easy dinner.

So the point of this post is that I'd vaguely heard of bone broth from an acquaintance who is eating certain foods to help heal her body from lots of issues related to my thyroid issues (she has PCOS, Hashimoto's, and psoriasis, among other issues). Most of the stuff she eats looks kind of gross and seems like a pain to make. 

But I figured if I was boiling chickens and all, I could easily make a bone broth and keep it in the fridge to use in future recipes. 

It was super simple. I just added both chicken carcasses to my crock pot along with any leftover unpeeled veggies from that week (onion and garlic and carrots and some zucchini peels), filled it to the top with water, and put it on low for 3 days. 

It seems like a really long time but it takes awhile for the collagen in the bones to completely release. The point is to get all the really good stuff out and that takes time.

My crock pot doesn't stay on indefinitely; after the maximum 10 hours it switches over to warm, so I had to keep restarting it.

I successfully found cheesecloth at Target (it's in the kitchen gadgets aisle in case you are wondering and yes, I did have to search for that on google)!

After straining the bones and veggies, I was left with a dark brown broth. After chilling in the fridge overnight, I skimmed the fat off the top and now it's ready to use.

I really felt like a homesteader when I poured it into used (and rinsed) wine bottles for longer storage. I'm on the lookout for a great soup recipe so I can use some of this up but so far I made risotto with a combo of the bone broth and the rest of the leftover chicken stock and the whole family loved it. I've made risotto many times but this time Bean remarked that it was really delicious.

He knows flavor, I know nutrition!