Home Made Pumpkin Soup and Stock

Today I decided that it was time to use the two frozen chicken carcasses in the freezer to make some stock - they were from previously home cooked roast chooks.

I bought some extra little chicken bits, I usually use chicken wings as they are cheap, but used some other cuts as they were on special and had both skin and bones with the meat which is key.

After browning off these chicken bits in some butter to create some flavour. I then added 3 home grown leeks, a carrot 3 sticks of celery and some home grown garlic and heated them up, after a few minutes I added the frozen carcasses and then covered it all with some cold water and added in some home grown herbs of thyme, oregano and rosemary and then left it to heat up and summer away for over 3 hrs.

Stock cooking

I then strained the stock in a tea towel lined strainer and returned the liquid to the pot where I added butternut pumpkin, a sliced onion and a carrot.

Stock strained

Pumpkin cooking in the stock

After cooking for about an hour I then whizzed it all up and with some added cream, salt and pepper and voila

Pumpkin soup

I reckon that this is the best stock that I've ever made and that also means the best pumpkin soup I've ever made - Winning!

Creamy Tomato Chicken and Veg

Now that I'm back in the land of employment it's time for my Sunday Cookups to start happening again.
This morning I was watching some cooking clips on Youtube and got inspired to make a Creamy Tomato chicken and veg dish

So I started off with a heap of ingredients - mushrooms, onion, garlic, chilli, red peppers, cherry tomatoes, chicken fillets, cream cheese and home made pasata

I then browned the chicken on the stove top and then put them into a baking dish. I then put all the vegies into the pan and cooked them for a while in some oil and butter, once they were cooked they went ontop of the chicken. I then put the pasata into the pan with a block of cream cheese with some chicken stock paste. I melted down the cream cheese and then this got poured over the top of the ingredients already in the baking dish. The dish was then topped with grated cheese

And then after baking it for about 20 minutes you get this

It really doesn't look that great when plated up but here it is and it was YUMMY!!!!!

I also got the rest of my pumpkin soup I made last week into containers to put into the freezer