saturday soup.

On Sundays after church, Josh wants soup. Our church is across the street from Food Lion, so we used to just stop on the way home and pick up some Campbell's for lunch. I quickly got tired of this ritual, because as it turns out, canned soup is not very good. Has no one else has noticed? Also, we usually have perfectly good homemade leftovers at home. Why are we spending money on bad food when we have free, good food at home? That sounds like something my mother would've said to me twenty or so years ago, and she had a point.

The solution was for me to start making soup on Saturday night. Then the free, good leftovers would be soup, which was just what my sweet man wanted. Sometimes, they were even better Sunday afternoon, after the flavors had had a night to mingle and marry.

So now we go sailing on past the Food Lion, no need to stop and get oddly-metallic tasting soup filled with meat-like lumps. Except last Friday, I got a text in the middle of the day which pathetically said only "soup?" I had to inform him that there was no soup, there would be soup tomorrow, but not today because he already ate it all. However, I have yet another solution. Each week, I will take a couple of portions out of the soup pot and freeze them, such that my poor, darling husband need not suffer from a soup emergency.

Anyway, I have a lot of soup recipes.

Today, I'm sharing my chicken noodle soup recipe. It starts with "throw a chicken into a pot." I follow the recipe as-is, though I leave out the mushrooms because they are gross. It is a Paula Deen recipe, so it is a bit decadent. No butter, but there is parmesan cheese and heavy cream. But it makes a huge pot of soup, so I like to think that the unhealthy elements are only a small part of the whole.

Note that the recipe calls for a 2.5 - 3 lb chicken. Well, this must've been in the days before chicken growth hormone, because even the smallest birds at the grocery store are 5 pounds. So as a bonus, I am left with a couple of cups of already-cooked chicken meat that I can throw into some other recipe or even freeze and save for later use.

This soup tastes like someone loves you. Even though I make the soup, when I eat it, I feel loved. I'm pretty sure it's the fact that you're making homemade stock when you think you're just making soup. Homemade stock tastes like love, which is why the pioneers had much higher self-esteem (I made that up).

Make some for someone you love today (including yourself!): The Lady's Chicken Noodle Soup

Oh, and I have one more thing to say about soup. Once, when I was a kid, we were eating chicken noodle soup at the dinner table, and my dad sneezed a whole mouthful of it all over my face. It was truly spectacular and disgusting. That event finally taught a man in his 60s that he needs to turn away or cover his mouth when he sneezes, at least at the dinner table. Every time he sneezed at the table after that - he must use a lot of pepper - he would turn away, and then give me a Look.