Chicken Soup, of course!
Monday I decided to make homemade chicken noodle soup. Most everyone who knows me well know that I am not a very good cook. I try, I really do, but frankly I have more failures than successes when trying something outside of a few good things that I make well. I can’t make grilled cheese to save my life because I either burn it or it’s soggy and I can’t make french toast. Scrambled eggs? Forget it..inedible. And I usually don’t like to cook any sort of meat unless it’s ground, because really, who can screw up browning meat?
Needless to say, homemade Chicken Soup was WAYYYYYYY out of my comfort zone.
But anyway, I was inspired and so I decided to do it. I picked up Claire from preschool on Monday and the girls and I headed to the grocery store to get all the necessary items. I realized that a lot of the ingredients started with the letter C, so I turned it into a letter hunting adventure for Claire in the grocery store. We walked into the vegetable area and I told her to go look at all the signs on the vegetables and find all the vegetables that begin with the letter C and pick one to put in the soup. I figured she would pick carrots, or celery…but no, my child went for a nice big head of cabbage. Yum. So we picked up the other veggies..carrots, celery, a really big onion, an ear of corn that Claire picked out, and of course the giant cabbage and moved through the store. I let Claire pick the chicken to be roasted….yeah I figured if I was going to do this, I was going to do this right….and she picked a 4 pound, Amish Chicken that was roughly about $14. Organic chicken = highway robbery. I was going to put it back and get the National brand chicken that was like $4, but then I had visions of a happy chicken frolicking on an Amish farm and I had to buy it. If it was that happy running around with kids in bonnets, it would probably be really good in my soup.
We took all our purchases, went home, had some lunch and the girls went down for a nap. I put the bird in the oven (alas poor Yorik), and chopped a ton of vegetables. I added them to our trusty stock pot, with the chicken stock and boiled away. When the chicken was roasted (Perfectly I might add) I added the meat to the soup nd let it simmer most of the afternoon. Yum. I added the noodles at the end and we enjoyed it!
The first report from the taste testers was that it was “delicious”. Madeline even ate it without complaining. I suppose my first venture into chicken soup was a success.
And yes…I took pictures. Enjoy the slide show.
Oh and 3 days later….we still have a ton left over. Jonathan just heated up a bowl for a snack. I think I’ll be doing this more often as the weather gets colder!