"I made chicken soup, and it actually came out well!"

Sometimes I intend to blog about something I've cooked or baked, but by the time I get around to it, the chosen food item has already been consumed, so there's no picture! I do so like pairing photos with my words that I often just cancel the post! Such is the case today, except I decided to blog anyway. My mother told me to. ;)

A couple of days ago, I was talking with Mom on the phone and told her essentially the title of this post! My brother, sister and I grew up knowing that when you were just about finished with a whole chicken or turkey, you made soup with it! Muffins and "Bone soup," as Mom still calls it, was one of our favorite meals, in fact. Going into marriage, I felt confident that I could follow suit. Yet my first couple of attempts were failures. Most recently, I remember trying to make soup in the crock pot, but the carrots and celery never got soft and the noodles I added quickly turned soggy.

This week was different! When I pulled the partially eaten rotisserie chicken out of our freezer, I dumped it into the top part of the beautiful pasta pot my dad and mom-in-law gave us for Christmas. It has a mesh insert which is separate from the bottom part of the pot and made the soup-making easy-peasy! I added sprigs of fresh parsley, rosemary and thyme from our herb garden and dried sage from my mom-in-law's to the chicken. Several chopped carrots and celery stalks went into the bottom part of the pot, and it was ready to go! Once the water boiled, I let it simmer for at least an hour and then let the fragrant, newly-made chicken stock cool.

The next step was to debone the chicken. Normally, I'd pull it out of the pot with a giant fork, or perhaps dump it into a colander over a second pot, but the mesh inner-pot made the job a breeze! Good pieces of chicken went back in with the carrots and celery. Bad pieces went home (to the trash . . . "home" just sounded like it fit!).

Another thing I learned recently was that a can of diced tomatos adds a nice dimension to chicken soup, so I added one of those. I learned it from my mom-in-law who learned it from a veteran homemaker in New England. :)

I think I added some salt and pepper. I simmered it some more.

And I also boiled up some noodles separately to add to the soup as we ate it. No more soggy noodles!

Ah, it would be so much better with pictures, but such is the life of the mother of a darling five-month-old! Any soup-maker knows that you can go a lot of different directions with soup; with another recent chicken carcass, I added white beans, salsa, cheddar cheese, sauteed onion, and maybe some frozen corn? It would have been good with frozen corn. John loved it. :D But, despite the flexibility, it IS possible to mess up chicken soup, as I know too well . . .