It's Not Campbells But....

Well I can certainly understand how Campbell's & Progresso stay in business. Today i attempted to make homemade soup. Mike has been under the weather this weekend with a nasty cold (I've quarantined him to the basement), so I thought I would be all domestic and a nice fiance and attempt to make him chicken soup they way his mom always made him. First thing this morning I gave my future Mother-in-Law a call to find out all the special ingredients. The ingredients were quite simple, they are:

1. An over roaster chicken
   
2. Celery
   
3. Carrots
   
4. Onion
   
5. A small can of Hunt's tomato sauce
   
6. A small pasta, such as orzo, or some other one that I can't remember - I went w/ the Orso
   

After a fun little trip to Shoprite - side note: it is probably best to stay away from any Shoprite on a Sunday afternoon -- especially during their can can sale. Anyway, after picking up the ingredients and finally getting started on assembling the soup late this afternoon, I filled up the biggest pot we had with water, brought that to a boil and then after washing and cleaning the chicken, I dropped the bird in there - literally dropped - also a bad idea, water went splattering all over my nice clean stove....

So after the chicken & water came to another boil, I went to go add in my chopped vegetables, that however pushed the water up to the top of the pot, almost overflowing and I hadn't added the tomato sauce yet and the chicken wasn't fully emerged in the water either. This is when I decided to put everything in the crockpot. That seemed to work out better. I cooked everything in there on high for 3 hours, when I could see that the chicken was starting to split and was ready to fall off the bone. After that I strained the broth and vegetables back into the original stove pot and cut up the chicken into pieces, tossing the bones & dark meat. All was good again and I added in the orso to finish it off.

Of course because I started so late the soup wasn't ready till about 9:00pm, so we haven't tried it yet but I'm optimistic!