Recipe: Grandma Marya's Chicken Soup [edit]

Other Names: Chicken Soup

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Edited by: Shirley Rogers, Sheri, Barnaby Dorfman, karyn, Lady Catherine Gourmet, Alisa Escanlar

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Yield: Many; usually makes at least a gallon, plus chicken leftovers.

[edit] Ingredients

	A chicken. (preferably a good organic, free range, happy one.)
2	large onions, peeled
2	large carrots, scrubbed
3	stalks celery
4	cloves garlic, peeled
1	tablespoon thyme
1	tablespoon whole black peppercorns

[edit] Preparation

Step 1	As my grandmother would tell me over the phone, "Put the chicken in the pot. (a large stockpot) Put everything else in. Cover the whole thing with water, and bring it to a boil. Turn down to medium, and simmer for another 1 1/2 hours. Cool and strain."
Step 2	Keep the stock for soup or set some aside (i freeze it) for future use.
Step 3	Keep the chicken for other recipes, or add some back to the soup. I also keep the carrots and slice them into the soup. Serve with freshly boiled egg noodles; salt to taste.
Step 4	If you are making chicken soup because you feel a cold coming on, which is usually when I do it, eat the onions after you strain them out of the broth. They don't taste strong by then, and onions are good for the lungs!

[edit] Tools

Stockpot

[edit] About Grandma Marya's Chicken Soup

My grandmother was famous for leaving out some important instrucion when she would hand off a recipe, so I always felt like I needed to call her whenever embarking upon a dish I had learned from her. I would call her when making chicken soup, however, just so I could talk to her. She would laugh at me, and then give me the weather report, a run-down of what all she had eaten in the past few days and tell me where the best sales on groceries were that day, despite the fact that I lived thousands of miles away.
Now that she has passed, I can no longer check the accuracy of any of her recipes - and I inherited a huge file of them. There are at least 10 coffee cake recipes in there - none are the same, and all of them appear to be missing some key ingredient or instruction. She liked to be the one to make everything the best, I suppose!