Crock Pot Success

Good morning, Emily! I woke up this morning and I was so excited to post - my very first post ever! I hope you can eat all your spinach before it goes bad. I always seem to start off enthusiatically with a bag of spinach but then a few days will go by and when I get around to thinking about eating it again, it is already spoiled! I hope you have more discipline than I do!

Coincidentally, on morning before the debut of our new blog, I decided to make homemade chicken noodle soup. It actually turned into chicken barely soup at the last minute. So we're off to a good start!

My recipe for chicken noodle (barley) soup involves a whole fryer chicken which is not my favorite thing to prepare or handle. I appreciate that God provided us meats to eat (and goodness knows my husband just HAS to have some kind of meat with his meals), but I'm a little queasy about cleaning the chicken and preparing it for cooking. But a couple of years ago, I realized how cost effective it was so my desire to be thrifty diminished most of my hesistations.

So I chopped up some onions, carrots and celery. Then I plopped the chicken in the crockpot on top of the vegetables and added some water, salt and pepper and set it to high and left for your house.

When I returned from my dentist appointment, the house was filled with the smell chicken noodle soup goodness. Jason even recoginzed the smell as he walked up the stairs. The chicken was done (actually too done and I should've cooked it on low), and so I removed it and searched for some noodles to add for the final 30 minutes. I couldn't find any, but I did find barley that I must have bought about a year ago (pre-baby). Does barley go bad? I hope not. I threw a couple handfuls into the chickeny-broth and let them cook while I pulled all the meat off the chicken (again, not my favorite task).

Finally, we mixed it all together and we had ourselves a hearty bowl of soup. Jason appreciated how filling it was but added a hefty dose of regular salt, seasoning salt and pepper to flavor his bowl. I added a tiny bit of salt and pepper too. I even gave Elliott a piece of carrot.

So my hope for today is that I will continue with this momentum. On the menu: pasta. Usually we just have pasta with alfredo sauce and some chicken if I have time to cook it. So my challenge tonight will be to spice it up with some vegetables.