Entree / Chicken: Chicken and Dumplings

From Shelly Carey

Ingredients
Chicken
4 ½ lbs whole chicken
2 teaspoons salt
2 bouillon cubes
Dumplings
1 ½ cups cooled chicken broth
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/3 cup butter
2 eggs, beaten
All-purpose flour (as needed)
Milk and flour mixture
1 cup milk
1 Tablespoon black pepper
3 Tablespoons flour

Directions
Add chicken and salt to a kettle and cover the chicken with water. Boil the chicken slowly for 1 ½ hours or until tender. Let the chicken sit in the broth for 30 minutes. Remove skin and bones from chicken. Reserve 1 gallon (4 quarts) of chicken broth in a large kettle on the stove. Taste broth to see if it is salted enough. Add 2 chicken bouillon cubes.

Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces. Tightly cover in a bowl and place in the refrigerator.

To make dumplings, mix all dumpling ingredients except flour in a large bowl. Gradually add flour to the mixture until the mixture is too hard to stir with a large spoon. Remove the dough from the bowl and place on a heavily floured dough board. Knead the dumpling dough. Roll out the dough and then cut it with a pizza cutter into one-inch strips.

To add the dumplings to the chicken broth, bring the broth to a low boil. Pinch off thin bite-sized pieces of the dough mixture and drop one at a time into the boiling broth. Note: Don’t ever stir the dumplings. Whisk the milk, black pepper and remaining flour together before adding to the dumplings. Quickly add the milk and flour mixture to the dumplings. Turn heat to low and simmer very low with the lid on for 20 minutes. (Do not “peek”). Turn heat off. Let the pot sit for 20-30 minutes. In a six-quart crock-pot, put a layer of chicken, then a layer of dumplings. Repeat the layers, ending with the chicken on top. Cover the crock-pot and turn heat to low for two to four hours.