Chicken Stuff For the Soul

"Chicken Stuff."  Shall I talk about it at length? No? Too bad, here goes.

Chicken can be canned, pressure cooked, roasted, or braised. However much you like. Chicken can also be turkey, if you are so inclined.

Chicken into bite-sizes.

Add mashed potatoes to the menu at will.

Gravy: Don't use package stuff, it often has corn starch in it. Instead make your own with chicken drippins or start with a basic roux (sp?) of equal parts butter/margarine and flour: two tablespoons each to start, get bigger if you want to make more. Add some chicken broth, and Better Than Bouillon chicken base by half teaspoons until you get the taste you like. If you need to thicken more, mix flour with cold water to make a gluey consistency and add a dribble at a time to hot broth.

The tricky bit is the stuffing. You're going to have to guess-timate how much you will eat of this Stuff. For a regular meal, I use:

1 loaf of cheap bread, torn into bite-sized pieces. (Which freeze well for later use, btw.)

2 - 3 stalks of celery

One yellow onion

2 teaspoons pepper

One teaspoon salt

3 - 4 sticks of margarine (I only use Saffola)

Melt the margarine (I start with two sticks) and add finely-chopped onion and celery. Add more margarine, and simmer until onion is translucent. Add pepper and salt.

Drizzle this mixture over the bread chunks with a slotted spoon, folding it into the bread frequently. When bread is deliciously moist, spread it on a cookie sheet and let it bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees, or until crunchalicious.

The margarine/celery/onion drizzle also freezes well.

Mix chicken with gravy and serve with crunchy stuffing and mashed potatoes.

Now, if you want to make soft stuffing, you do the same mixture for the stuffing, but before you've begun any of the other procedures, you put one chicken liver in a saucepan with about a quart of water and cook the living crap out of it, mash it up, and cook it some more.

The seasoned bread goes into a baking dish, and gets the livery broth ladled over it until it is bread pudding consistency. Bake this beast for a half hour at 350 (you're looking for a slight crust on the top.) orrrrrr microwave on setting 7 for 4 minutes.

Lately I've been making only a handful of the crunchy stuff because the rest of the crew (including Joan) prefer the soft stuff, the Philistines.


My mother would have told the rest of the family to rot before she'd go to the trouble of making soft stuffing; if she cooked chicken livers, it was only because they came with the chicken and became part of the gravy water. (She did not believe in Communism, Tarot Cards, or bouillon.)(Or cooking soft stuffing outside a turkey.) I on the other hand, bought a container of chicken livers for this very purpose, and divvied the little container into seven small freezer bags, for use when I need leverage with my son-in-law, who will agree to almost anything if he gets Chicken Stuff in return.