Whole chickens are less expensive per pound than cut chicken, and using as much of it as possible is a challenge I haven’t tackled before. I broiled it last night basted with olive oil and sprinkled with spices. However, since I misjudged the cooking time, it wasn’t finished by dinner. It went in the fridge overnight after I siphoned off the liquid chicken fat (also refrigerated) from the pan.

This morning I took the chicken apart, separating the skin into one pile and the meat into a bowl. The meat went back into the fridge to await its fate as chicken pot pie this evening. I will use the chicken fat as a binder in the crust for the pot pie.  The skin went into a 350 degree oven on a cookie sheet for ten minutes until it got really crispy.

I have been stashing vegetable scraps (onion, celery, carrot, and cilantro leftovers from other recipes) in the freezer for the last month. The chicken carcass went into a big stock pot with the vegetable scraps, 8 cups of water, peppercorns, bay leaves, and a garlic clove. It has been simmering for four hours so far, and I hope my neighbors are salivating over the yummy smells. Once it has simmered for another hour, I will strain it, refrigerate it overnight, remove the excess fat, then freeze the chicken stock for future use.

I have made bacon-rosemary crackers before with bacon drippings, so making chicken crackers didn’t seem too far fetched. I used this Olive Oil Crackers recipe as a jumping off point because I was intrigued by using my pasta machine to roll out the dough.  The last couple of times I made crackers it was difficult to roll the dough uniformly and extra thin, so using a pasta machine makes lots of sense.

I altered the olive oil cracker recipe mentioned above in the following ways:

• Used chicken fat in place of the olive oil
• Added a tablespoon of ground dried rosemary
• Added a teaspoon of fresh ground pepper
• Added 1/3 cup of finely chopped chicken skin “cracklings”

This recipe is also different from the last one I tried in that it uses half semolina flour instead of all regular flour.  With the cracklings in the dough, 5 was the lowest setting the dough could get to on the pasta machine.  I definitely recommend using a pasta machine to roll out cracker dough – very excellent aesthetic and texture results! The finished crackers, while an excellent vehicle for dip, don’t have a very distinctive taste on their own. I thought for sure that the chicken would lend a hearty flavor to the crackers, but that wasn’t the case.  Next time I will use fresh herbs and more of them.  Herb flavor is easily lost in the flour, so I need to double the amount of seasoning. Since the cracker flavor turned out so unimpressive, there is a very good chance that they will get ground up and used as coating for (you guessed it!) oven-fried chicken. Bacon fat definitely makes a tastier cracker than chicken fat.