Chicken with Herbed Dumplings

I’m going to start off by telling you that I was really excited about this recipe. I love chicken and dumplings, but it’s never as good as when my mom makes it homemade. I was hoping for great things from my own homemade dumplings, but such was not the case. I made this a couple of weeks ago, before I had the idea to start this blog, so the only pictures I have are of what it was supposed to look like and what I ended up with. But before I get ahead of myself, here’s the recipe I was trying to follow:

Ingredients:

Chicken:

• 1 whole chicken (3 1/2 to 4 lbs)
• 2 carrots (cut into 2 inch pieces)
• 1 celery rib (cut into 2 inch pieces)
• 1 onion (quartered)
• 1 bay leaf
• 4 Tbsp. unsalted butter
• 4 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
• Salt
• Pepper

Dumplings:

• 1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 Tbsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 2 Tbsp. chopped fresh herbs, such as thyme and oregano
• 2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 cup milk

Directions:

1. Make chicken: Put first five ingredients in slow cooker. Pour in 6 cups cold water. Cover and cook on high until chicken is tender, about 3 1/2 hours. Remove chicken from cooker and set aside. When cool, remove meat and shred into large pieces.
2. Strain cooking liquid and set aside. Melt butter in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Add flour and whisk until smooth. Add cooking liquid to pan, increase heat to high, bring to a boil and whisk until smooth and slightly thickened. Return sauce and chicken to slow cooker. Season with salt and pepper.
3. Make dumplings: In a small bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and herbs. Add butter and use fingertips or a pastry cutter to work butter into dry ingredients until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Whisk egg and milk to blend, then stir into flour mixture to form a sticky batter. Drop batter by tablespoon into cooker. Cover and cook on high until dumplings are fluffy, about 1 hour.

Pickles:

I have never bought a whole chicken. I always buy frozen boneless chicken. I don’t really even know what to do with a whole chicken. But the recipe called for a chicken, so I got a chicken. I bought the smallest one they had at the store, and when I got home, it barely fit into my crock pot. I shoved as many onions and celery bits inside and around the chicken, then filled it up with water, but I could only fit about half the amount of water I was supposed to. After the chicken cooked, I had a bit of a time getting it out of the crock pot, since it was such a tight fit. I think I ended up using a big metal spoon and a shoe horn. The chicken looked great, but I still had to take all the meat off the bone. If you’ve done this often, it might not take long, but I have never done it, so it felt like it took forever! Everytime I would think I’d located and extracted all the meat, I’d find some other crevice hiding a little more. Not wanting my chicken and dumplings to be short on the chicken, I kept going until I could go no more. If this was the end of the recipe, it wouldn't have been to bad, but this was still prep work, so it was a bit taxing on the amount of time I had to spend cooking that day.

My second pickle goes back to the fact that I have a small crock pot. I don't remember when I bought it, but I think it's a 3qt. model. The problem this caused was that I had only been able to add 3 cups of water instead of 6. I figured this would leave me short on broth, so I made some extra broth, assuming there would be room once I was down to just chicken meat instead of a whole chicken. I was wrong. I still didn’t have room for all the broth.

Dumplings. According to this recipe, I was supposed to be able to mix up the dough mixture and drop it into the liquid in my slow cooker, then come back an hour later and have wonderfully fluffy dumplings. What actually happened was that the dumplings came apart and remained doughy. I still don't know what I did wrong to make that happen. My mom suggested that perhaps the liquid in the crock pot hadn’t been hot enough to cook the dough, but I’m not sure. In addition to all that, something expanded during the hour I was waiting, so the crock pot started overflowing. I didn’t see that coming.

End result:

After an hour of sitting, my broth was full of delicious chicken and horrible dumpling. By this time, between cooking the chicken, pulling the meat off the bone, dropping the dumplings, and waiting for it all to come together, I’d spent most of the day either making or waiting on something in the kitchen. All I had to show for it was this horrible, inedible mess.

Salvaging the Mess:

After consulting my mom, we came up with a way of salvaging the meal. After all, I’d gone through all the trouble with that chicken, and the meat from that was still very good. Since the dumplings were, for the most part, floating, I used a slotted spoon to remove as much of that mess as I could. Since some of them had broken up into fairly small pieces, I couldn’t get it all out, but at least there weren’t any meatball sized dough balls floating around any more. By this time, the broth wasn’t really broth anymore, it was a little thicker, which was actually good. In the end, instead of trying to eat it from a bowl, I just made a pot of white rice and spooned the chicken concoction over the rice. Here’s what it was supposed to look like:

And here’s what I ended up with:

It tasted very good served this way, but I definitely took the long way in getting there. Maybe if I had a bigger crock pot and hadn’t had to try to improvise, this would have come out better. In any case, I won’t be attempting this recipe again anytime soon.