Chicken Soup

I've told you all before that my mom could do more with a chicken and feed six hungry people than I ever could. I had five and one chicken BARELY fed us. Maybe my own family just ate more, I don't know. I don't think so, though, because as children we rarely had snacks, and it was a long time between lunch and supper (dinner). Whereas, my children had a mid-afternoon snack and would not have been as hungry as my siblings and I.

Since my mom was given chickens by our chicken-raising neighbor, we had chicken and eggs (not together) often. And, yes, my mother ate the feet (after they were cooked), and she'd eat the wing tips, you know that tiny part that nobody eats and good chefs keep to make stock from? Well, she'd eat the wing tips, bone and all. She had great teeth, and as far as I know, she only lost one tooth in her whole life (except for baby teeth) and never had a cavity.

Anyway, here's her recipe for chicken soup.

YOU NEED:

1 whole chicken
3 stalks celery, sliced (I prefer to use the leafy part of the celery, as did my mother)
1 carrot, sliced
salt
enough water to cover the chicken

DO NOT cut up the chicken.

Put the whole chicken without the innards into a large pot (a crock pot will work), surround the chicken with the celery and carrot bits. Add about 2 tblspns salt. Bring all this to a boil, then reduce and simmer until the chicken is falling off the bones (about 2 hours at low heat). If using a crock pot (they didn't have them when my mom taught me how to cook) just put on med heat and cook from morning till late afternoon. The longer the chicken cooks, the easier it will be to get it off the bones.

Remove the chicken from the stock. After the chicken has cooled enough to touch, take the meat off the bones. If you cook the chicken this way, you will get the benefit of the skin flavor, the bone marrow, and the back meat, which is hard to get off the bone without cooking it first.

Put the meat back into the pot. Now you're ready to make it soup. Just add either noodles or rice, whichever is your favorite and boil all this together until the noodles or rice are cooked.

You can also use this mix to make another favorite of our family -- chicken and dumplings. At the stage where you have the chicken back in the stock, make dumplings using Bisquick. The recipe is on the box. Yummy!

If you're wondering what happened to the innards, my mom would fry them up and my dad loved the fried liver, heart, and gizzard. Yuck!

ttfn