Chicken Potato Fricasse
List of Ingredients
Ingredients
3 gallons water
2 - Stewing hens with giblets
1 lb Chicken giblets (hearts etc)
1/2 lb ground beef for meatballs (you may want to add more)
1 can Franco American Mushroom gravy
1 can Heinz Condensed Tomato soup
2/3 jar 'Healthy Choice' Extra garlic spaghetti sauce
1 small tin tomato paste
1 package Purely Idaho, onion potatoes
8 carrots (chopped in various sizes and shapes)
8 celery sticks (chopped about 2" strips)
6 medium potatoes (peeled and chopped)
3 medium onions (chopped into wedges and chunks)
4 garlic cloves (chopped in half or thirds)
2 tbs salt
1 chicken leg and thigh
Seasoning packet from Purely Idaho potatoes 'Onion' Potato mix
5 peppercorns
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp salt
2 bay leaves
Recipe
I got some stewing hens from the food bank. Man, I finally know where the idea of a
rubber chicken came from.
These 'utility birds' are only edible as a stew or in
soup (hence the name) but I decided to do some variations with my food bank materials
and made a chicken fricasse out of them instead.
Again, please note, these ingredients
are what I have from the food bank and I have mixed them together for flavour.
In this recipe I used a very large aluminum soup pot. since I intended to boil off a lot
of water (about 4" from start to finish) in order to produce my sauce (that can aslo
double as a soup if you ladle it off towards the end of the reduction process).
Add water and 1 tsp salt to a large pot and bring to a boil. While this is heating up
rinse chicken, then cut up into legs, thighs, wings. Don't bother separating the breast
meat from the hen as it will soften off the bones and they should all fall apart as you
stir the mixture during the end of the cooking process, so toss the rest of both the birds in without cutting them, skin and all.
As the fricasse cooks you can examine the meat on the bones of the
breast to see if it is falling off as stewing hens are very tough until boiled soft.
When water comes to a boil, put in chicken and blanch, skimming fat off of water with
a sieve. Once most of the fat has been skimmed off add remaining ingredients
Chop all vegetable ingredients and add to mixture, add chopped potatoes from Purely Idaho
potatoes (they key to this recipe is the flavour packet under the potatoes that will
enhance the flavour of the fricasse).
Add giblets, necks etc. (many people do not include chicken livers in fricasse because these are cooked and used in a separate recipe to serve alongside the fricasse, called 'chopped liver. If you have a few chicken livers, fry them up with a little onion and then chop
them into a fine paste, adding some oil and salt to serve as a side dish. To make it even
better, cut up some chicken skin and fry them on their own until they shrivel up to produce golden brown rinds to sprinkle over the liver like croutons, these small bits are called 'Gribbens' [pronounced Gree ben or sometimes Gree Vens] and they are lightly salted)
Form beef into about 25 small meatballs (you may wish to spice the meatballs with some
salt, pepper, bread crumbs and egg to form the meatballs), open tins of soup, gravy, tomato paste, sauce, and add everything to pot.
Reduce to a low rolling boil (Med to med-low) and cook for 6 hours or until liquid has reduced about 4" from original height in pot, stirring occaisionaly to prevent ingredients from sticking to bottom of pot and burning. As with any good fricasse, you should be
left with a pot full of chicken meat that falls off of the bones right away for the best
part of this meal is finding bits of meat at the end of chicken bones. Try not to stir
chicken wings and drumsticks too hard to leave some 'suprise meat' on the bones, but most
of the bowl (if done right, will have you picking bits of bones out of your mouth as you
separate the soft meat from the bones by sliding them over your tongue as if you were
a parrot trying to open a pumpkin seed, this is especially true when it comes to eating the soft meat inside the chicken necks).
Serve with a glass of sweet red wine, and use Egg loaf (Challah) to dunk into the sauce of the fricasse while eating. An excellent appetizer that you can keep on hand, or have a
few bowls of it as a meal on its own (for lunch).
*Optionally
You can add some sugar to this recipe if you like a sweet tomato sauce like in Swedish meatballs, I suggest you try it out first by adding a bit to a small bowl of the
stuff.
Yields about 2 gallons of fricasse.
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