The weather will turn cooler soon and our meal plans will turn to roasted meats and comforting soups.

After the family has devoured your delicious roasted chicken dinner and left nothing but a pile of bones behind, make sure you stop to see the potential for another meal in that pile of bones. Or, at the very least, some tasty stock to be used in future meals.

Our mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers and beyond have been making stock from meat bones for ages.

My first attempts when I was a young(er) wife were less than impressive. My stock tasted like water that had once briefly thought about a chicken. Blech!

After many years of learning and experimenting I finally figured out how to make chicken stock that tastes like chicken. You know, stock you'll actually want to use for something.

The first step is to save those bones! You don't have to make the stock right away. You can freeze the bones, accumulate a good stash of them, and then make a nice big batch of stock all at once.

Put a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a big stock pot. Heat it on high heat and dump all those bones and skin in there. Let the pieces brown really well for a couple minutes and then give them a stir and brown some more. Keep going till you think you'll burn the chicken if you go any further. It's probably sticking to the bottom of the pan by now and that's okay. Browning it like this is going to give the broth a really rich flavor.

Now pour about a cup or two of water in to deglaze the pan. Stir it well and scrape the bottom of the pan to loosen the browned bits.

Then fill your stock pot nearly to the top with water.

While you wait for your stock to come to a full boil, gather up a few things to add another layer of flavor to your stock.

You probably have what you need settled in at the bottom of the produce drawers in your fridge.

An onion, a stalk of celery, any fresh herbs you have on hand (rosemary, sage, thyme, parsley, whatever you have hanging around) and a couple of bay leaves should do the trick. You can add salt and pepper too if you want. I usually wait to see how the sesoning on the chicken effects the end product. Then I adjust the seasoning at that point.

Toss them right into the stock pot. And let the whole thing come to a full rolling boil.

Now, turn the heat down to a low simmer and walk away. Let it simmer for at least 2 hours. But the longer you let it simmer, the more it will reduce and the more intense the flavors will be. And the more your house will be filled with the delicious aroma! You can give it a taste every hour or two. When you're happy with the flavor intensity, remove it from the heat and scoop out the big pieces of chicken and veggies with a slotted spoon.

Set a strainer over a large bowl and pour the broth into the strainer.

You can pour your stock through the strainer a second time, but this time lined with a couple of layers of cheesecloth, to get the smallest bits out of it if you like.

Refrigerate your stock for an hour or two and you'll be able to easily skim the fat from the top.

I like to divide my stock into 1 or 2 cup portions and freeze it to use in recipes. MUCH tastier than salty, canned broth. And practically free! I just made it from what lots of people would have thrown away.

Or you could turn it into tonight's dinner by  bringing it back to a boil and adding in some noodles and fresh chopped onion, carrots, celery and any chicken you can pick from the bones you used to make the stock.

I'm ready! Bring on the roasted meat and comforting soup weather!

You can make stock from other meat bones as well. Beef, pork, turkey would all be useful stocks to have in your freezer.

You can also save up a collection of clean veggie scraps (potato peels, the ends of carrots and onions, broccoli stems) and make veggie broth the same way.

In every case, the key to great flavor is browning it all in the beginning and then LONG, SLOW simmering.

Making something useful out of what seems like nothing (scraps you might have thrown away) saves you money!