January 2025…an unexpected moment of hibernation…

I hope that everyone’s 2025 is off to a peaceful start. For me, the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 have had a bit of a March 2020 vibe. I picked up the flu over Christmas…and then the Midwest was buried in a historic snowstorm. Since Christmas day, I think I have been out of the house only two or three times.

Feeding yourself well when you don’t feel much like cooking (or even eating)…and when you don’t have the luxury of being able to make a quick run to the store…is an interesting exercise. But since there is a lot of illness going around at the moment…and winter storms will be the lot of many over the course of the next couple of months…I thought some of the things I made would be worth sharing with all of you.

The other thing I should mention that began to guide a lot of my daily food preparations during these early moments of the new year has been a desire to empty out my freezer stash a bit. I love my freezer(s). Having things that are ready made (by me!) is an unbelievable luxury. But when you are in the habit of using your freezer regularly as a means of diminishing food waste, at some point you find that you have a lot of odds and ends that are taking up a lot of space. So as I cooked from my freezer over the past few weeks, I made a concerted effort not to add anything new. The recipes I share this month will reflect that, too.

Chicken Soup

I have never really been a big fan of chicken soup. I think I associate it with the Campbell’s variety of my childhood: an overly salted hot liquid with the occasional tiny nubbin of “chicken”…and not nearly enough noodles. I imagine if I had an amazing family recipe for chicken soup in my background—the kind that makes you feel better when you are low in both body and spirit—that I would feel differently.

While I was down with the flu, I began to crave the chicken soup of my imaginings: a rich and flavorful broth crammed full of soft, fresh vegetables, and big chunks of shredded chicken. I think noodles would have been nice…but I didn’t have the right kind on hand…and I certainly didn’t have the energy to make them. So I put them out of my mind.

I began to poke around a bit online and flip through some of my cookbooks looking for a likely recipe. Most recipes that I found started with a whole chicken…and then took several steps and a few hours to make. Worse, they produced enough soup to feed a large family or a small army. Even if I had had a whole chicken on hand, none of this would have been appealing.

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