Chicken Stew, Take Two
In the ongoing quest to use up the chicken in the freezer (did I mention that we had a LOT of freezer-burned chicken breasts in our freezer) I took another stab at chicken stew tonight. I was working from this recipe, with a few adjustments on the fly. I diced up the chicken before starting, did my usual dredge-in-a-bag trick (using much less flour), cooked that separately, then started over with the veggies in a bit more oil/butter. Instead of water (blah!) I used chicken stock, but ended up adding a second cup of water to get any sauce. I was dubious about making the roux in the middle of the veggies, but that part worked just fine. It needed significantly more spicing than the recipe called for and overall, was not as flavorful as I'd like. I think the basic process is fine and I do like the one-pan approach, but I think could be adapted to a very different set of flavors to better effect. It was not nearly as good as last week's chicken pot pie, but at least the chicken is successfully used up and J. seems happy with the prospect of eating it as leftovers. And I'm cooking!