Tuesday, January 31, 2012

thrifty chick-n-soup

I usually cook two chickens on the weekend & use the meat to make soup, enchiladas, sanwiches, etc. throughout the week. Same goes for vegetables. Buy what you need for the whole week & chop them up on Sunday. The great thing about cooking the whole bird is, once you get it started, you can pretty much leave it unattended for a couple of hours. This leaves you plenty of time to read a good book, clean the house or watch the Nate Berkus Show.





Todays recipe - boil your whole chicken:


Take the bird out of the bag. Rinse him inside & out under cold water & put him in a huge pot. (A lot of recipes call for vegetables to be cooked with the chicken & discarded when done. I suppose it gives the broth more flavor, but I don't want to throw out my hard-earned veggies. So, for me, it's just a lonely chicken in the pot. He'll get visitors later.) Fill the pot with enough water to cover the bird & bring to a boil. As soon as the water starts to boil, turn down the heat & let him simmer in the hot tub for about 1 1/2 - 2 hours. You will know the meat is done when you pull on a leg bone & the meat falls right off. Turn off the heat & let the pot cool. When it has cooled some, you can ladle the broth into jars for future use. Pick the meat from the bones, pack in a bowl & refrigerate.





Weekday chicken Soup Recipe:


For this recipe, I chopped-up any cooked chicken that wasn't pretty enough for a chicken sandwich. About 2 cups?

plus...

8 oz. dry noodles

3 quarts chicken broth

A couple carrots & stalks of celery, chopped

A handful of chopped onion

salt, pepper, dried dill


In a soup pot, bring the broth to a boil. Add the carrots, celery and onions. Cook until the carrots start to soften up. About 10 minutes. Add noodles. Cook for another 5-6 minutes. Add the chicken and seasonings. Cook until the chicken is warm & noodles are cooked.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Farmhouse Organization

I need to get organized before I get lost in heaps of laundry & papers & the Hoarders tv crew can't even find me for an interview. Ok, I may not be that bad. I just have the spring-cleaning bug. Yes, it's only January. But the weather here has been strange, at best, & it sure feels like spring. With four kids, one job, one farm & a house, I have a lot to organize! I've spent a lot of time on my pinterest page looking for organizing tips I can use. I think I've found a few good ones. My main problem is that I don't have a lot of money to buy the fancy organizers & I don't want a bunch of plastic boxes floating around my house. They're ugly. My first & best idea came from Martha Stewart with her office in a trunk. I already had this box filled with out of season decorations. I put the decorations in the basement (where they should have been all along) & now I have a mini office for all my housewife papers, kid's school papers, receipts, seed catalogs...














On to the kitchen. I hate wasting food. No matter how I try, we still throw a lot of food to the chickens. So I hung this by the refrigerator to remind us all to eat those leftovers! It's just an old picture frame. I painted a piece of plywood with flat-black paint & had my husband attach it to the frame. Then I tacked on a ribbon & hung it on the wall.





On to the laundry room. I found this fruit box in the barn (along with many other boxes & scraps of barn wood). It looks a little rough because it had been out there a long time. But, it was sturdy & serves its purpose.
















Tomorrow, I'll start washing all the animal's feed bowls & buckets. Fun, fun.