The Faery Princess Ballerina Art

First, go to the grocery store and wander through the fresh fruits and vegetables. Pick out the things that appeal to you, things that are pretty or interesting or strange.

For this particular stock, I picked out:
A red and a yellow bell pepper
A bunch of kale
A big handful of spinach
A bunch of mustard greens
One garlic bulb
One white onion
One piece of ginger
One red cabbage
One pound of carrots
Two brussell sprouts

Then we went to the meat section and picked out a whole chicken.

We came home and got out the big crock pot. Mama washed the kale, the mustard greens and the spinach. She tore off bits of the kale and greens and put them in the pot. She rinsed the spinach and put that in too. I rinsed the brussell sprouts and popped them in the pot too.
I very carefully cut the red and the yellow peppers into pieces. We only used half of each pepper. Mama watched me to make sure I was careful and didn’t hurt myself.
I also very carefully sliced the whole onion, after Mama peeled off the dry skin on the outside.
We put in six cloves of garlic. All we did was pull off the outer skin and cut them in half.
Mama peeled a piece of the ginger and sliced it in big pieces into the pot.
I washed one carrot and chopped it up very carefully and into the pot it went.
Then Mama rinsed the chicken clean and put it in on top of all the other stuff. We had to push things down around the sides a little to make everything fit.

We did not use the cabbage at all. Mama says “yet”.

I ground fresh salt and pepper from the mill on top of everything in the pot. Mama added some oregano, sage, basil and Chinese five spice.

Then we poured fresh clean water over all of that until the pot was full. We put the lid on the pot and I set the timer to low for 10 hours.

Then we went to bed.

In the morning the entire house smelled so incredible.

First, Mama removed both the brussell sprouts and put them aside in a different bowl.
Then, Mama added some more water to replace what had evaporated and left the pot on warm until lunch time.
At lunch time she shut the pot off completely. We dipped out just the broth and not any of the chunky stuff. Once the chicken is cool, Mama will take that out and take all the meat off the bones. If it isn’t too gross, I will help her. Then we will make real chicken noodle soup, with the chicken in it and everything.

Mama put the strained broth into a pot that goes on the stove. She filled it halfway up with broth. I then ground more fresh salt and pepper into the broth. I added two big handfuls of medium egg noodles into the broth. Mama added one more too because I wanted to have lots and lots of noodles in my chicken noodle soup. Then Mama added more water to fill the pan up and we turned on the heat.
We used a medium low heat to bring the soup to a slow boil. We turned the heat down a little when things started to get too frothy or too close to boiling over. We cooked the noodles until they were tender but still a little firm, just the way I like them.
Mama pulled out the bowl with my brussell sprouts in them and ladled the soup out over my brussell sprouts.

This is how I came to make up the recipe for my wonderful delicious brussell sprouts noodle soup.

I also helped Mama put all the ingredients into the bread machine so we could have hot fresh tasty homemade bread with our dinner of real chicken noodle soup with the bits of chicken in it still.

Later on Mama will come back and tell you what we do with all the left-over big pieces of things left over from making our chicken soup stock.