Moo's Scalloped Chicken

This is comfort food at its best. Scalloped chicken is an old recipe. I don't even know where Moo first found it. I do know she made it for us back in the late 50s and that she adapted the original over the years until she had the recipe that she shared with her daughters. I highly recommend this one.

5 pound roasting chicken
5 cups water
Trinity (celery, carrot & onion)
2 tsp. salt
12 slices firm bread, remove crusts and cube
1 cup celery, finely chopped
½ cup yellow onion, finely chopped
Salt & pepper
¼ pound melted butter

Cover chicken with water and add trinity (celery, carrot & onion) and salt. Cook gently until done. Remove chicken from broth and let cool enough so you can handle. Reserve broth, strain out celery, carrot and onion. Remove the chicken skin and lay out on a piece of foil on cookie sheet. Crisp this skin in the broiler, crumble into bite-size pieces, and set aside. Remove all the meat from the bones. Discard carcass. Remove crust from bread slices and cube. Combine bread cubes, chopped celery and chopped onion. Season with salt and pepper. In a casserole, layer 1/3 of bread cube mixture. Cover this with 1/3 of the chicken. Followed by more bread cubes, more chicken, more bread cubes and the last of the chicken. Top with the crisp, crumbled chicken skin.

An hour before serving, heat 2 cups of the chicken broth you saved from cooking the chicken and 1 cup of milk. Pour this over casserole and dot top with butter. Bake in 350° oven until hot through. Then turn oven up to 450° for a few minutes and brown the top. Watch carefully at this stage to make sure you don’t burn casserole. Serve.