A frozen alternative...

Several days ago Richard hauled out a 10-pound bag of chicken leg quarters from the freezer because said we were out of room and I needed to cook it so it would take up less space.

So after it had thawed sufficiently in the refrigerator, I put about 5 pounds of it in the crockpot and started cooking "Two Meals for Four People", a recipe from my Mennonite cookbook that results in chicken stew for one meal and then a very hearty soup for another meal.

The other 5 pounds got liberally sprinkled with a Jamaican-style jerk spice and went into the oven to bake.

So after all of this chicken was cooked, I took everything off the bones, and packaged it up, and all of the the went into a pot on the stove and boiled some more, and so by early evening I had a nice kettle of  very hot and very flavorful chicken broth.

I decided to set the whole deal outside on the porch to cool off a bit so the fat would rise and it would be cold before I put it in the refrigerator. As the evening progressed, I totally forgot it was out there (naturally) and so it sat outside all night and until midafteroon yesterday when I couldn't find the pot I was looking for and suddenly remembered  I had forgotten to bring it in.

I guess the only reason why the whole mess wasn't spilled all over the porch was that it was too cold for the raccoons to venture out and help themselves. At any rate, it was 5 degrees outside yesterday when I looked at the thermometer and it didn't rise much over about 15 degrees for the entire day, and so when I brought the broth in, it was frozen solid.

The porch just might make a handy-dandy freezer on the odd occasion when we are plunged into the deep freeze. Which somehow reminds me of the wonderful story I read a few years ago about the woman doctor in Antarctica who ended up operating on herself for breast cancer because there was no way they could get her out. Seems to me they slept in portable freezers to help keep warm...