Herbed Dumplings - recipe

One of my favorite meals for as long as I can remember has been chicken (or turkey) and dumplings, always from scratch. After having roasted chicken or a Thanksgiving turkey, we'd boil the carcass for a nice stock, which later was made into soup with dumplings.

The soup part is fairly easy, and tends to change a bit each time. (I'll probably do a post on that later.) The dumplings, though, are a different story. For a while, I used Bisquick for my dumplings, but recently I've been making them from scratch.


Herbed Dumplings

1 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cream of tarter
1 tsp salt
2 Tbsp dried parsley
1 Tbsp dried thyme
1/4 cup milk
2 Tbsp melted butter
1 egg, beaten

Sift together the flour, baking soda, cream of tarter, and salt. (This makes sure it's thoroughly mixed. I did a batch where it didn't mix all the way, and they had sour parts inside the dumplings.) Stir in the parsley and thyme.

Mix together the egg, butter, and milk. Pour the egg mixture into the flour mixture, stirring until it's combined. Make sure all the flour is wet.

Bring your soup to a boil. Drop the dumpling batter into the soup by tablespoons. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 12-15 minutes.

Tip - you want a lot of surface area in your pan for this. Also, you need enough room for the dumplings to expand. Don't try to cook this in too small of a pan. I did a batch in a pan that wasn't big enough, and it pushed the lid up...releasing steam and heat, so some of the dumplings didn't cook fully.

I did manage to fix them. I pulled part of the dumplings and broth out and put them into another pan, then re-covered both pans and let them simmer again to finish cooking the uncooked dumplings.