Home made, fresh chicken stock

Well, I promised a post on making fresh chicken stock from a roast chicken, so here we are! Obviously, the first step is to roast a chicken, which I assume you'll have done. I will also assume that you have eaten your fill of the meat and are left with a carcass which looks something like this:

Using a sharp knife, remove as much of the meat as you can. This can be used for all sorts of things, such as stir fry's, risottos, etc, so it's worth keeping and we don't really need it for making the stock.

If you followed my recipe for roasting a chicken, then you'll have the vegetables (onion, carrot, celery) left over from the roasting tin. Put all of these, along with the carcass into a large saucepan and add enough water to nearly cover everything:

Now, cover the pan and bring to the simmer with a low heat. Leave it simmering for approximately two hours or so. You'll need to check on it from time to time to make sure it isn't getting too dry, so add more water every so often. After about two hours, it should look something like this:

When it is done, the bones will be completely clean and the carcass will have fallen apart. Now, to extract the stock, simply strain this through a sieve, using a fork or something similar to squeeze out every last drop of juice. When that's done, you should end up

with something like this:

Once this has cooled down, it can be frozen and kept for quite a while. Fresh stock is excellent for making risotto! Enjoy.