Grandma Marya's Chicken Soup
By: Anonymous
Published: Saturday, December 5, 2009 - 2:58am

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

Preparation

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." 2 Keep the stock for soup or set some aside (i freeze it) for future use. 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. 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!

About


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!