Chicken soup with dumplings

I want to use the last leftover chicken thigh. Hate to waste, don't cha know. But I do not have any commercial chicken broth. 

But I do have frozen chicken bones that I could use to make excellent broth.

And I do have some sort of experimental chicken bullion that is not powder, and is not goop in a jar, certain to be scientific as astronaut picnic supplies and wildly over packaged as pre-portioned cups of Jell-O Pudding Snacks. Weird. It's what the guy brought. Who knew? I thought the thing was going to be powder. 

In these small ways I go with the flow. Roll with the punches. Dodge and dive. Float like a butterfly and sting like an accepter of substitutions. Why not? 

At my little sister's house she made chicken and dumplings exactly as my mother did, and I mean exactly. The same reliable thing. Over and over and over. The exact same thing had crossed generations. Whole family thing. Big pot. Whole chicken. That's the main thing. Cooked in water until it falls apart. Standard mire poise plus potatoes. Standard egg pasta rolled thickly and cut into large squares. These large squares of pasta stick together sometimes and cook into clumps of three squares or two squares and those clumsy incompletely cooked things are my favorite. The flour that covers them thickens the soup. This pot of whole chicken soup really is something special. Even though the noodles are the weirdest things. My mother never made regular dumplings.

My whole family calls this "chicken pot pie." So when my sister said she was making chicken pot pie, decades having elapsed since the last one, naturally I was expecting a pie. 

As you do because pie is a pie and chicken in a pot is by no means a pie. So why call it that? 

I could not have been happier to see this chicken in a pot thing with odd square hand rolled egg noodle dough pasta. I could have cried. I marveled at her replicating fidelity.

Well, this is not that. This is not a whole chicken and it is not those odd square noodle "dumplings." It is only a thigh. And it is not broth from the bones of a boiled free range chicken. Rather, it is pantry broth concentrate in little pudding cups. Ew, weird. 

Everything else; muy authentico, I mean das echte Ding, Pennsylvania Dutch chicken pot pie. 

You are a peasant. You don't know what year it is because time isn't your bag. These things right here are how you start everything to begin building flavors because your world hasn't yet opened to chiles and to tomatoes and to a whole bunch of other cool things like all of the squashes and all of the corn and all of the nine-banded armadillos. 

Turns out this stuff is really good. You should buy some.

My whole thing tonight is about this potato. I want its role to be disproportionately large. Everything else is just decoration for this potato. And I picked the smallest potato. 

Leftover chicken thigh. I will use these onions too. 

I already have onions in this thing. This will be double onions. 

And these onions are dilapidated.

But also extremely flavorful.

One chicken thigh. This is all that I am getting.

Roasted poblano chile has no business being here.

Look at me. I am iconoclastic.

Sticking a Mexican ingredient into a Pennsylvania Dutch thing. And you talk about an odd-ass ethnic group to be, that is a strange one. Right up there with the Amish and Mennonites but not nearly quite so extreme. Mum said they spoke low German. For some reason she kept emphasizing that. I thought that she meant high-level German, proper German, grammatically correct German, contrasted with their Americanized careless German, but now I think that means high ground German and low ground German.

This chile has no business here. Yet I put it here. 

I have no business here in this western state, yet I was put here.  

This is not an ordinary egg. Well, it is. But now ordinary eggs are extremely careless eggs pooped out of chicken's butts by the millions. Billions I bet you. A dozen cost nearly $8.00, I think. Pretty soon the eggs will be a $1.00 each.

That doesn't sound so bad, actually.

To get how regular eggs used to be all the time we must turn to the local farmers who run their operation the way people have for centuries with all the improvements along the way. Those eggs will be a lot more expensive. 

If you like, see "homesteader" in YouTube search. There are several well known homesteading families that track their own activities. I've watched so many of these videos I've seen their kids grow up.

All that is why this is so yellow.

One whole beautiful million-dollar farm-tended egg to only 1/2 cup of flour. See, that is a lot of egg to flour.

* 1 gorgeous free range organic egg pooped out of a free-ranging grub-scratching chicken's cloaca, its all purpose channel.

        "Shut your mouth."

I am not making this up. I read it. 

        "Where?"

Believe it or not, I read it in chicken-related books! I read it on chicken-related websites. I read it on chicken-related pamphlets. I saw it on chicken-related videos. 

         "Pffft. Like what?"

Like this! 

When the kids squat they are laying an egg. Out of the same hole that poop comes out. And pee. Mixed. The same hole used for chicken-sex. Multipurpose hole; pee, poop, having sex, producing eggs.

         "Stop it! You are grossing me out." 

This is a very good egg. It cost 63¢ which is incredibly cheap when you think about it. When you think about, um, all it's been through. 

        "Someone had to touch that thing and then wash it."

Oh man.

Remote memory. Mum is behind me. I am reaching into the nest under the chicken to feel for an egg under there. 

        "What happened?"

I and I screamed and ran out of the chicken coop.

The smell of that chicken coop is permanent.

This soup and these dumplings are amazingly good.

No herbs. 

Peasants had tons of herbs. 

Sure. Why not? 

One time I read a whole big fat book about what peasants eat. 

I think it was called A Peasant's Feast.

There it is. Abe books, three pages back, The Old World Kitchen: The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking. Oddly, a book with words. Not a pop-up book. That's very odd for my library. But there it is. I bought the book for $1.00. And I read it. 

I dismissed it being European peasants and pretended the whole thing was American. That worked for me. 

I learned that poor people back then ate much MUCH MUCH better than we do today and, frankly, I stopped feeling sorry for them.