The easiest way to cook a whole chicken, plus broth!

I am a soup lover. My husband always claims not to like soup, but that's not really true. (What he doesn't like is plain broth. Can't really blame him there!) My toddler loves soup as much as I do, and in fact that's our primary vegetable-delivery system for her.

So once or twice a week I make a big pot of soup. Currently we're alternating between chicken noodle and sausage with orzo (recipe in a later post!), because they're jam-packed with veggies and they're light for our lifestyle change. I love, love a good cream of potato, but that isn't as diet-friendly so I haven't been making it. And soup is also great for Lent!

I also feel like I'm single-handedly keeping Swanson in business buying boxes of chicken broth. I never had boxed or canned broth in my life before the last couple of years, because my mom always, always made her own. I have done it a few times, but until recently we've been severely restricted in our storage capacity, living with a series of apartment-sized freezers, so it was easier to buy boxed broth when I needed it. But now we're in a bigger house with a bigger freezer, plus we have a chest freezer in the garage for overflow storage. It's amazing.

I made broth recently but wasn't happy with the way it came out -- I think my water-to-chicken-carcass ratio was off. But then I saw a couple of tutorials for cooking a whole chicken in the crock pot and then turning the bones into broth... And THEN I saw that Perdue Oven Stuffer roasters were on sale at my grocery store.

It. Was. Time. At this very moment, my rich bone stock is cooling in God's refrigerator (a.k.a. my back deck). When it's cool, I'll skim the fat and then portion and freeze it for next week's soup!

And here's how you can do it yourself!

1. Roughly chop vegetables and put them in the base of the slow cooker. I used a large onion, three carrots and the core of a bunch of celery. You could also use balls of aluminum foil if you don't want to use or don't have the veggies -- the point is to elevate the chicken so it's not sitting in its juices the whole time it's cooking.

2. Remove any innards from the cavity of the chicken (save these!), then rinse the chicken and pat it dry with paper towels. Season the skin however you wish -- I used salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder and paprika, massaging it in.

3. Nestle the chicken in the slow cooker. I happened to have fresh rosemary so I threw some on top for extra deliciousness. My large chicken (nearly 10 lbs!) overwhelmed my large Crock-Pot, by which I mean the lid didn't close all the way. It worked out anyway so don't panic if it happens to you.

Then I turned the slow cooker on low and set the timer for 9 hours.

This is what mine looked like after about seven hours, when the chicken had cooked down some and the lid finally closed. At this point I turned the slow cooker up to high because my chicken was so big and had been cooking with the lid vented the whole time. About an hour later, I checked it with my instant read thermometer, removed it from the slow cooker, covered it with aluminum foil, and let it rest while I made the sides for dinner. Then I carved the chicken -- one breast of this monster was enough for the four of us!

After dinner, I picked the chicken clean of edible chicken -- best to do this while it's still warm -- and dumped the carcass back into the slow cooker along with the veggies, still in the bottom with the chicken's juices, a bunch of parsley I had lying around (optional!), and filled the Crock-Pot to the top with water. Then I just turned it on low and left it overnight.

This morning the whole house smelled like chicken deliciousness. I strained the stock into a big pot, put it outside to cool, and discarded the carcass and vegetables in the garbage, because after cooking for 24 hours they are good for nothing.

I have a couple of rotisserie chicken carcasses and leftover herbs and vegetables stored in my freezer -- which is where I put the innards from this chicken, to use next time -- and I think I'll be using the slow cooker to make that too instead of putting it on the stove. So easy!

Did you know...

... That if you go to smile.amazon.com instead of just going to amazon.com, you can set it up so that your every Amazon purchase results in a donation to the charity of your choice? I set mine to Catholic Relief Services and as long as I start from smile.amazon.com -- which is proving a challenge to remember! -- then 0.5% of my purchase price will automatically get donated to CRS.

Awesome, AmazonSmile.

Consider yourself referred:

I started to write a whole post about the CDC's newest recommendation that women of childbearing age should never ever ever drink ever because pregnancies just drop out of the sky and you don't have any agency over your body and you are way too stupid and female to make informed decisions about your drinking vis-à-vis sexual activity.

But as usual, Simcha Fischer and Jenny Uebbing did it better. So go read them.

Daleiden vs. Planned Parenthood: Who's the criminal?

I'm over on Catholic Mommy Blogs today, talking about Lenten fasting. Check it out!

This news is over a week old, but David Daleiden -- the activist behind the Center for Medical Progress videos exposing Planned Parenthood's grisly practices of selling aborted baby parts -- has been indicted by Harris County, TX on multiple charges, including a felony charge of tampering with governmental records, and a misdemeanor charge of buying human tissue.

{Note: according to this indictment, it's possible to criminally buy human tissue, while the seller on the other end of the transaction is judged to have done nothing wrong. Seems legit.}

It's long been known that some counties, even in Texas, would indict a ham sandwich, so long as said ham sandwich happened to be conservative (see: Travis County's politically-motivated indictment of Rick Perry over a veto threat). In this instance, one of the prosecutors is a Planned Parenthood board member.

Nothing about this passes the most cursory of sniff tests.

Here's the thing: David Daleiden may have done something criminal in the course of his investigation. I'm not sure one way or the other. If he did, I would bet he did so in the full knowledge that he may have to pay a price in the service of getting this information into the public consciousness.

We are not the ones occupying the "end justifies the means" side of this cultural divide, and as such I think that if there have been laws broken, then Daleiden should get his day in court. But let's be serious: it's not possible that Daleiden broke the law by buying the fetal issue if Planned Parenthood simultaneously did nothing wrong -- legally wrong, that is, because there's really no question whether Planned Parenthood's every action and instinct is morally wrong.

So! To that end, please consider signing this petition, which has over 108,000 signatures already, asking Harris County to reconsider their nakedly political witch hunt, and instead focus their investigative and prosecutorial efforts where they belong: on the ghouls of Planned Parenthood.

During a medical emergency, might it actually be better to panic a little?

Have you ever gotten a frantic call from your childcare provider? On Friday morning, I got that call.

I had literally just stepped out of the shower when I got a phone call from our nanny's daughter. Our nanny is Nepalese, and her English is pretty good but she's not that comfortable on the phone. Her high-school-aged, totally-Americanized daughter was home as schools here had been closed all week after we got 30+ inches of snow last weekend, and so she made the call for her mom.

"Declan's having a hard time breathing. Should we call 9-1-1?"

He had been fine in the morning. It was less than five hours since I'd seen him. These things ran through my head, along with "no family history of asthma," and so I said, "Please take him outside in the cold air and I will be there in fifteen minutes or less. If you think he needs help faster, go ahead and call an ambulance." I threw on clothes and left my house within two minutes, with soaking wet hair. I left the house completely insecure because our front steps never got shoveled from the huge snowfall, and my husband had taken our only one garage door remote with him and I had no way to close it behind myself.

When I got to my nanny's house, she was standing on her front step, in short sleeves, even though it had started to snow again. Declan was in her arms, gulping shallow breaths. I put him right in the car and called the pediatrician, already driving in that direction. The flurries that had been falling had metastasized into legitimate driving snow by now. Declan fell asleep before I was out of my nanny's neighborhood, but he was still breathing shallowly and periodically coughing. 

It took almost 20 minutes to get to the pediatrician's office, because the driving snow and the poorly plowed roads slowed everything to a crawl. By the time I carried him inside he was loudly wheezing. The doctor -- the only doctor in our one-man-show of a pediatrician's practice -- was in with us within two minutes. 

We opened up Declan's clothes and his sides were heaving as he struggled to take in enough air. Our doctor listened to his chest and told me he had bronchiolitis and would need to be given a nebulizer treatment immediately. After the treatment, the wheezing had mostly stopped and I left with my son, calm now, plus a prescription for an inhaler and a warning that whenever my son gets a cough or cold from now on, my first thought should be "albuterol." 

So we have a family history of asthma, now, for all practical purposes. 

He's doing really well. He's fairly cooperative taking inhaler doses, especially for a typically-frantic medicine refusenik, and we haven't heard any wheezing since early yesterday. The doctor said to listen to his breathing, but ultimately it's just a cold and we should treat him normally. I think he took five years off his nanny's life.

I can't decide, though, if I reacted correctly. I am, by nature, Not A Worrier. I'm a consummate coper and I try not to borrow trouble (which presents an interesting contrast -- and eternal source of conflict if we're not careful -- with my worrywart husband). Even though it worked out that he's fine, part of me wonders if I was arrogant not to have the nanny call 9-1-1. The loudest part of me just refused to think it was very serious. But a one-year-old struggling to breathe is serious, especially when I couldn't evaluate him myself over the phone. Once I saw him myself, I could see that he needed medical attention, but his need wasn't so acute that I couldn't drive past the nearest emergency room to our own doctor, which is what I did. Should I have been more worried? Slightly panicked? 

I'm going to be kicking this one around for a while. I don't know the right answer.

It's Ordinary time now, so how about a Christmas card?

I am unbelievably busy and tired this week.

Declan has been sick almost at all times since we moved in the first third of December. I am down to almost no sick leave at work (although it continues to accrue at all times, just not quickly). The house is not complete -- we're waiting endlessly for the new furniture to arrive, and there is almost no art on the walls -- because of the aforementioned sick-at-all-times baby.

Well, one-year-old.

How.

Just how.

And he's been sleeping like garbage, so we're all sleeping like garbage. And we're finally having some success potty training the three-year-old, which is awesome but involves way more pee on Mommy's hands than I was expecting -- naive? You betcha.

Anyway, all this to say: I've been meaning to share our Christmas card with you for ages, so naturally I waited until the Christmas season was officially over to get my shizzzzz together. Also I mailed them before I moved because sometimes I'm no dummy, and sure enough I couldn't find the extras until yesterday.

So:

Merry Christmas-is-over 2015! Catch you in ten months when we start doing it again!