Soup's on!

So both my babies were home with me today - HHP, who is home with me every day since he's only 3 months old, and my husband, who was home sick with a mysterious fever.

I figured a good project for the day would be to make some chicken soup for my ailing spouse.  So just before HHP was to go down for his morning nap, I stuck him in the Ergo and walked down to Elat Market - the local Iranian-Jewish grocery store.  The butcher there kindly skinned and cut up a whole chicken (just a lil' 2-1/2 pounder) for me.

Since I've made stock a few times before, I consider myself a pro (insert "ha ha" a la Nelson from The Simpsons). So I decided to wing it today.  I took my smaller stock pot out, placed the chicken pieces at the bottom, filled it about 1/2 way with cold water, then added a bunch of other stuff...

Including an onion, a couple stalks of celery with greens, a couple carrots, a couple cloves of garlic, a couple chunks of fresh ginger, fresh parsley, fresh rosemary, whole coriander, allspice, cloves, bay leaves, and peppercorns.

After an hour or so of simmering...

I let the pot simmer for a little over 3 hours - at one point, the liquid dipped to about a 1/3 full so I added some more to bring it back up to 1/2 full.  I think it's ok to do this so long as it's not in the last 30-45 minutes of simmering.

Once I felt it was done, I used tongs to pick out the chicken (which by now was fall-off-the-bone tender), and a Chinese fry basket to get most of the big chunks of debris.

Chicken pieces

Debris

Once the chicken had cooled a bit, I picked all the bones & grizzle out, and broke apart any large chunks.  I then poured whatever was left in the stock pot through a sieve and into a smaller pot...

I put the shredded chicken in the pot, along with one chopped onion...

One whole medium onion turned out to be a bit much - next time I'll just use one-half.

And some chopped celery...

I would have added carrots too but I ran out

I brought the soup to a boil again, then simmered until the celery & onion were soft.  I also seasoned the soup to taste - with kosher salt, white pepper, and fresh-ground black pepper.  

We happened to have a ton of leftover rice...

Q: Who puts away this much leftover rice like this?
A: My husband.

So I heated some up, then put a little scoop in each bowl just before serving...

I roused my husband out of bed...

And had a nice early supper together!

Too bad we're out of ice cream!