Charcoal chicken soup base

The sidebar of this blog promises an occasional “failed recipe”, and today I am making good on the promise.  Last night I set out to turn the ravaged carcass of a roasted chicken into a delicious chicken stock soup base.  My recipe goes like this:

• Put the leftover chicken bones, fat, and gristle into a reasonably large pot.  (If you’ve already thrown the chicken bones into the garbage, fish them out again.  They’ll be fine.)
• Add to the pot an assortment of seasonings: peppercorns, sliced onions, a few cloves of garlic, and some chopped celery, for instance.
• Add 6 or 8 cups of water, depending on how much stock you’d like to make.
• Turn the heat to maximum, and leave the pot on the stove for an hour or more.
• When the kitchen fills with smoke, remove the pot from the heat.  Allow a few minutes for it to cool.  While waiting, you might open some windows and use a towel to waft the fumes away from the smoke alarm.

You should be left with a thoroughly charred chicken carcass embedded in a thick black layer of now unidentifiable food matter.  Use a chisel to dislodge the chicken, and throw it out.

Good work.

Using this recipe means that you have a nasty cleaning job ahead of you, since the black paste, although it can be slowly scraped out, leaves a residue that resists even the most vigorous scrubbing.  To clean it, use a mixture of vinegar and baking soda: pour them into the pot and leave them for eight or ten hours.  Then scrub.  It should clean up nicely.