ghetto band-aids and chicken noodle soup.

I will start off by saying I should win sister of the decade award. Okay, sister of the week at least.  I am a vegetarian. I've been a vegetarian at least 15 years.  My sister isn't one, and she's pretty sick with a sinus infection which in her case almost always turns into bronchitis. She's on antibiotics and decided to still go to work today, so I found a recipe online for Chicken Noodle Soup (homemade, from scratch!) and spent like $9 million dollars on ingredients for it. Alright fine, it was like $200 and I bought a ton of other stuff.

Until I joined Weight Watchers, I hated cooking. Now I don't mind it so much, so I thought this would be a fun challenge.  Carrying the reusable bags upstairs caused a miniscule cut in the palm-side of my index finger.  I didn't realize it until I was chopping onions.  After cursing around 35 times I ignored the band-aids in the cabinet and made my own.  My ingenuity helped me to create a band-aid with a select-a-size paper towel and approximately eight inches of scotch tape. It did the job very well.

The recipe said it'd take 50 minutes total. Lies. It took about an hour and a half.  But outside of low-sodium chicken broth, everything else was from scratch!  I was reminded why I am a vegetarian when I had to de-skin and de-fat (?) four chicken thighs.  Also, because I stupidly bought chicken on the bone (when the recipe clearly called for boneless!), I had to de-bone it after it boiled. I won't even tell you how much dancing around I did going "Ew, ew, oh my gosh, ewwwww" etc. 

When I cook, I tend to wing it, following the mantra: a recipe is a guideline... I added a couple of small potatoes and some celery root, extra celery and carrots, because the recipe called for parsnip and the grocery store didn't have any... I don't know what happened, but for some reason there just wasn't enough water / chicken stock.  In the end I had to add like 3 cups of water and 2 bouillon cubes to so it didn't turn into a huge pile of mush. 

I drove it to my sister at work and she tried it and said it was decent.  Good thing too, because she'll be eating it for the next six weeks. Always an adventure in the kitchen.