Chicken broth

Broth is my favourite dish. My mother used to make it when I was a kid, and I took out the vegetables and ate them first and then slurped the liquid which is so delicious.
Since a few years I've started making my own broth, based on my mother's and her sister's recipe. It's not difficult but you need a lot of time.


Ingredients
1 chicken
2 carrots, peeled and cut in pieces of 3 cm
2 leeks, cleaned and cut in pieces of 3 cm
2-3 branches celery, cleaned and cut in pieces of 3 cm
1 onion, peeled
2 shallots, peeled
3 garlic cloves, peeled
1 turnip, peeled and cut in big pieces
1 parsnip, peeled and cut in big pieces
3 bay leaves
1 tbsp dried thyme (or better: a few branches of fresh thyme)
a few branches parsley
2-3 cloves
8-12 black pepper corns
salt

Wash the chicken and put it in a pan with 2-3 l cold water.
Bring this to the boil.
Take off the froth on medium heat during 5-10 min.
Add the vegetables. Stick the cloves in the whole onion before adding it.
Add parsley and herbs. You can bind them together with cooking thread (this is called 'bouquet garni' in French), so they are easy to take out in the end.
Add whole pepper corns and salt to taste.
Bring this to the boil again.
Then lower the heat and leave it to simmer for 2-3 hrs on very low heat.
Take out the chicken, pour the soup through a sieve into another pan and throw the vegetables and everything else that remains in the sieve away.
Take the skin and bones off the chicken and put the pieces of meat away.
Leave the broth to stand in a cool spot overnight.
In the morning, take off the fat carefully with paper towel.
The broth is now ready for use.

I froze half of the broth and made a soup with the rest.
For this I chopped a few vegetables very finely (1 leek, 1 carrot, 1 potato, 1 onion and 1 turnip). I heated the broth until it boiled, added the vegetables and let them simmer on low heat for 10 min.
You can eat the meat cold or put it back in the soup to heat it.

Notes

You can add a little vermicelli or other pasta in the soup.
I also make this with beef in stead of chicken.
Claudia Roden advises to keep the cooked meat in a little bit of broth.