Chicken Soup
Here is how I cook chicken soup from scratch, making the homemade broth. I just take a whole chicken, clean it up, and put it in a big pot on the stove with water to cover it. You could use just chicken parts. I cook it until I can take the meat off the bones. Then take the chicken out of the pan, let it cool, and take the chicken apart. Throw all of the fat and bones away, and then cut the meat up into bitesize pieces. Then put the clean meat back into your broth (the water it came out of).
So now ya have the cut up chicken and the broth. To this, I add onions and salt and pepper and parsley. And then I add cut up carrots and celery, and garlic, if ya like it. Often, I will add some cut up tomatoes for color and flavor. Then, after the vegetables are soft, I add (depending on what I have) maybe some chicken noodle soup or some cream of chicken soup. It gives it more flavor. You could add a handful of rice or some noodles and cook it with the vegetables. And that is how I do it.
This recipe makes a lot, but this is always better the second time. You could also can this soup in canning jars if you have a pressure canner. I would leave out the store bought soup at the end. You could add it later for a meal. The old time Mother canned a lot of this soup to have on busy days when she didn't have time to cook and she needed an instant dinner. I have canned hamburger before ... it was fun. I left the fat in it and the fat on top helped to seal it in and I didn't have any of it spoil. The fat came to the top, ya know what I mean?
Oh, it's fun to make the old timey comfort foods. I have made a lot of soup in my day. It sure kept my family healthy and well fed. Many times, when I was busy with the children, I wouldn't have time to watch my soup, so I would just put it in the oven to cook on a low temp. When I homeschooled, after devotions around 9:00 in the morning, I would start my soup and it would be ready for our family meal.
Jim used to work at the airport, and he would go to work around 2 in the afternoon, so I always had our family meal around 11:30 or at noon. Jim would want me to go with him to do errands, if we had any to do, before he went to work. I would have the children do their hour of reading after lunch. But many times, we took all the children with us to do errands and they did reading when they got back. Papa always wanted all of the children with us wherever we went.
Often, we had five children with us to go to the grocery store. One cart was for babies and one was for groceries. I would buy a lot of food to make food with. My grocery cart would be so full, people would say, "Are you all going to eat all of that?"
I always said proudly, "Well, we have a large family." My cart would be mostly full of of potatoes and carrots, apples and oranges. I didn't buy much juice for the children but fed them a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. Our tables were always full of fresh lettuce salads and fruit.
Sometimes I would take a big can of peaches and put it in a big bowl, leaving all the syrup in. Then I would add bananas and apples, cut up. Sometimes I would add the little marshmallows and some coconut, whatever I had, but the bananas were especially good in the peach syrup.
In the spring, like now when my rhubarb is coming up, I made a lot of stewed rhubarb and then the strawberry rhubarb jam. Danny, especially, loved this jam.
And ya know, Mothers, if you make plenty of homemade bread the children always have bread and jam to eat as a snack. The homemade bread is so good for them.
Homemade Bread
Really, the whole wheat bread made with honey is the best bread. But, ya know, my family just liked the texture of the white bread the best. So I just figured that my white bread made from scratch was better than whole wheat store bought any day. A lot of the time, my brother would give me fresh eggs in the spring so I had these to make my bread. And my milk man gave me free goat milk. And to my white bread, I would add maybe a cup of whole wheat flour, then maybe a half a cup of cornmeal and maybe a half cup of oatmeal. Then I would almost always add a cup of mashed potatoes or a cup of fruit, maybe a cup of applesauce, or I would use the syrup off the peaches as part of my liquid instead of the milk called for.
I would make bread out of whatever I had. If I had a tablespoon of jam or jelly on the table and the kids weren't eating it, I would add it to the bread. Or maybe the peanut butter was about gone and I wanted to get rid of it, I would add it to my bread. If the cookie plate had some crumbs on it, I added it to my bread mixture. I tried not to waste anything. If I had made pancakes in the morning for breakfast and had some of the batter left over, I would heat it up a bit and add my bread yeast to this and make bread, using this as a starter.
Johnny used to eat about 10 pancakes in the morning before school. I am not kidding. I used to make pancake batter from scratch in one of those big plastic salad bowls, and the pancakes would be as big as a plate. Johnny was always really hungry in the mornings. Christian Joy would eat at least 5 big pancakes. The other children would eat about 2. They loved pancakes.
I would make surprise pancakes. They had to guess what was in them. One time, I had some left over chip dip that I thought was really flat. I put some in the pancakes. Actually, the dip was really garlicky ... Christian Joy loved them. They were her favorite. But not the rest of us. I probably made bread with that batter. Those pancakes were bad news.
Jill and I would make a package of chocolate chips last forever. Jill would make her chocolate chip cookies without any chocolate chips in them and, just before she put them in the oven, she would put a chocolate chip on the top of each cookie. If the cookie had one chip in them, we called them chocolate chip cookies. We were poor and raising kids. Good Grief!
