Kitchen Lessons Learned

A few weeks back I made a Chicken Dumpling soup. My chicken wasn't falling apart the way I wanted it to, so I had a brilliant idea: use my immersion blender to chop up the meat!! This way my chicken would be smaller, the way I prefer it, it wouldn't take a ton of time to do it and the best part - no burned fingers! (My other methods are a bit barbaric...) Here's what the soup ended up looking like:

Here's what I learned. Using an immersion blender to chop up chicken will give you a slurry of chicken, and will make a small amount of chicken fill a pot of soup. It's great if you are using lots of dark meat, as the dark meat easily blends into the soup. It's also great if you don't have a ton of meat and need to make it stretch. But it's not so great if you already tossed in quite a bit of meat! It ended up being overly chicken-y and Matt complained about the lack of meat chunks. (He likes chunks of meat, I prefer smaller bits.) It was also almost a grainy consistency with all the shredded chicken. But hey, you live and you learn right? And now I know how to make my chicken stretch if I need it to!! :)