My Very First Chicken and Dumplings

I am lucky enough to work in an office with a cafeteria on site. Even luckier, we have a real chef in the kitchen. Besides the salads and sandwiches, we get three hot entrees every day that are always good but sometimes are outstanding. Case in point, one day Becca made Chicken and Dumplings. My experience with dumplings in the past has been dough lumps roughly the density of a hockey puck floating in industrial gravy. The last time I had them was at IKEA and the sign did not lie. Not these here we had light, fluffy clouds of dough floating in a clear chicken broth. I was in love.

I told Becca how great they were and she claimed they were really easy to make. I did not believe her but she swore up and down. She gave me her recipe and I decided to give it a shot. True to her word, they were really easy! Unfortunately, her recipe also made enough for an army and I only feed two people at a time. After a couple of tries, I got it down to a reasonable portion for the two of us and made some other alterations to arrive at my very own dumpling recipe.

This recipe is an excellent way to use up a rotisserie chicken. Strip off the meat to put in the soup and use the carcass to make the stock. Leftover vegetables also work really well in the soup.

Ingredients

• 2-3 cups chicken stock
  
• ½ cup flour
  
• ¾ tsp baking powder
  
• 2 ½ tbsp cornmeal
  
• 1 tsp sugar
  
• ½ tsp salt
  
• ¼ tsp dried thyme
  
• ¼ tsp dried sage
  
• ½ cup milk or cream
  
• Cut up chicken
  
• Soup vegetables, to taste
  

Directions

Make a pot of home-made stock and get it simmering on the stove in the widest pot you have. Cut up some cooked chicken and throw in whatever soup vegetables you like. If you aren't using leftover vegetables, you might want to throw them in a sauté pan with a little olive oil just to soften them up before you add them to the soup.

Mix the dry ingredients together well. Add the milk or cream and mix just until the dry ingredients are incorporated.

If you have never made dumplings before, this is the point when you will think you have misread the recipe because you have a loose, gloppy mess. If that's what you have, you made it right.

With 2 large spoons, drop spoonfuls into the simmering broth, leaving a little space between each one. Put the lid on and leave it on for 12 minutes. No peeking!

Scoop the dumplings, chicken, and vegetables into bowls and cover with broth to serve.

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