Chicken and Dumplings

I came up with this recipe because we had some hotdog buns about to expire, and I wanted to see if I could come up with a use for them, other than my Mom’s bread pudding.  I was really nervous about how it would turn out, but now my family won’t eat chicken and dumplings any other way. 

For the main part of the stew I used chicken, onions, carrots, celery, and stock.  I started browning the chicken in my pot.  Again, I was looking for brown skin, but not worrying about fully cooking the chicken.  After the chicken browned, I added my veggies and cooked until softened. 

I put the chicken back in my pot of veggies and covered with my veggie stock.  Chicken stock is perfect here too!  I let this simmer until my chicken was fully cooked.  To simmer, first bring the broth to a boil at a high temperature, then cover and drop the temp to med/med-low.  There will be small bubbles, but less than a boil. 

Once my chicken was cooked, I pulled it out and removed the skin and bones.  I cut it to bite size pieces, about the same size as my veggies, and added it back to my soup.  You can leave this part out if you prefer to have actual pieces of chicken to dish up.  This would be beneficial if some of your family prefers white or dark, or for kids that love getting a drumstick.

Here is where my recipe gets a little strange, for the dumplings I use stale hotdog or hamburger buns.  For this recipe, I didn’t have stale buns, but they were on sale at the grocery store, so I left them out to dry out all day.  You can leave them out overnight or the oven on the lowest setting will also help speed this process up.  Just make sure you don’t toast them, which will mess up the texture.  Once they have had time to get nice and stale, throw them in the food processor.  Basically at this point you have made fresh bread crumbs.  I still like a little moisture in the breadcrumbs; they should not be as dried out as the store bought.

I added some flour, baking powder, butter and shortening to my breadcrumbs.  I didn’t measure my ingredients.  If you prefer to follow a recipe when cooking, use your favorite biscuit recipe and sub most of the flour with the bread crumbs.  I would leave at least ¼ cup of flour.  I added just enough milk so it came together as dough; it was a little moist, more the consistency of drop biscuits.

I used a little scoop to make some smaller dumplings in the broth, but I reserved enough to cover the top, so we would have some brown crunchy dumplings as well.  The later was at the request of my husband.  I loved the dumplings in the broth so much I was skeptical, but we all agreed it was an awesome change!

I baked the chicken and dumplings in the oven until the top dumplings were pretty and brown.  If you are in a hurry or want to skip this step, your dumplings will cook up quickly and just as well in your pot on the stove and you can skip the oven.  This is a crowd pleaser, and is just as good leftover!