3 pots at once make the procedure SO much easier!
And that means it’s time to make soups! At my house, my extra freezer has a couple of wire bins/baskets for storage on the bottom. One is exclusively reserved for bones, hence the name Bones Bin. It gets full after a month or sometimes longer depending on what we’re eating. It is comprised of things like leftover chicken carcasses, ham bones & skins, pork & chicken necks, some cooked, some raw, but all frozen solid. When the bin gets full I go pick up a couple bags of organic celery, carrots & a bag of sweet onions and get to work making ham, chicken, pork broth for cooking! If I can afford it, as I could this time, and have ham bones, I also pick up some Split Peas & Lentil Beans and make soups instead of just broth. I use a few carrots & celery each, 1 onion & 1 garlic cloves worth in each pot, regardless if it’s ultimately soup or broth. Using the food processor to make short work, 1 or 2 minutes, of the chopping & slicing of several pounds of raw vegetables, I just eyeball an equal division among the pots. Fill with water & bones and beans if applicable and simmer for a couple hours.
$40 worth of Chicken Broth in the making! And most people throw these things away!
The chicken broth pot must have at least 8 bird carcasses in there, picked over dinner leftovers, some from when I filet breasts off the bones before cooking but don’t do such a precise job, and also several necks are in there from our last poultry harvest too. It holds around 3 gallons of water and is packed as tight as it can be. It should yield around 10-12 quarts of extremely tasty broth that makes store broth taste like salt water! Not to mention a good broth costs about $4 for each of those quarts. That means I have turned what most families throw away into about $40 worth of high quality broth, by only adding $3 maybe $4 worth of fresh vegetables, and you don’t even have to add those! You can just boil down the bones by themselves and it’s still amazing!
I also had a ham bone & some skin from a big shoulder I purchased and divided up. They make great soup and so I made Split Pea and Lentil soup. Before I pressure can the Split Pea soup I will add several bits of ham from the shoulder, but I dont’ add that during cooking, I just use the bone. The Lentil soup will be served meatless but has a great ham flavor to it due to the cooking with the skin & fat, which is easily removed still in one piece after cooking down. Lentil Soup is really so great, super nutritious and when you do serve it, you can throw in whatever else you have on hand as far as meat or additional vegetables or add none! It’s VERY flexible! In fact, you can at this point strain the lentils and serve them chilled in salads, and then use the lovely broth for other meals & soups too!
Lentil Soup using some pork skin from a shoulder roast. The skin is easily removed once the soup is done.
I’ll be sure to post once I have all my beautiful jars full of homemade goodness! Hope you have a productive day!