Easy Pressure Cooker Chicken Stock

We had roast chicken for dinner the other day. We love buying a full chicken, roasting it and having plenty of chicken for a tasty dinner and enough leftovers for sandwiches. Adam has introduced me to the idea of making chicken stock with the finished chicken carcass. I love that this makes it even more economical and we get some really tasty stock for our freezer. The only problem is that stock takes a few hours to cook and we usually make a roast on Sunday evening.

Well I have found the solution; pressure cooker stock! I found this pressure cooking blog and realised I could make chicken stock in half an hour. Yay!

I just popped the carcass in the pot with some garlic, herbs and whatever few vegetables I had in the fridge. I used the final storage containers to add the liquid. I keep empty butter and big yogurt tubs in one of the kitchen cabinets and that is what I froze the stock in once it was ready. So I used these tubs to add water the pressure cooker so that I could make the correct amount! Then I brought it up to pressure and cooked it for 20 minutes. Easy!

Now I have four nice tubs of stock in the freezer ready to make fresh soup.

Emma

Compost Disaster

Well, we tried. We have tried to make compost on our roof terrace by putting it in a tub and maintaining it. I tried to balance the wet with the dry, to air it regularly and to mix it all up every week or two. But we opened it yesterday after being on holidays for two weeks and the smell was quite overwhelming!

Sadly, we have had to do away with the compost heap. I know it was ambitious to try and do this on a roof terrace but I still think it was worth trying to see if it would work. I guess we are sort of back to square one. Is there any homemade solution for compost if you have no soil or worms? There must be a suitable answer but I have managed to find nothing yet.

For the meantime we are going to revert to throwing all our garden and kitchen waste into the normal bin until we can find an appropriate solution.

Emma 😦