"Get Well" Chicken Soup

Now, I don't know about you, but in my book nothing combats nasty weather and cooties better than a steaming hot bowl of homemade chicken soup. This is one of those recipes you don't want to get into, if you don't have at least a couple of hours at home, but it does mostly cook away by itself, so there's plenty of time to get caught up on laundry, e-mails or just snuggle up with the munchkins and watch a movie.

You will need:
1 chicken (cut up or whole)
2 small or 1 large onion
4 garlic cloves
1 lb carrots
1 bunch of celery
1 lemon
2 bay leaves
salt & pepper
water

For the broth: Put your chicken, the onion (peeled & halved), the garlic (peeled), about 4 of the carrots (peeled & cut in half), about 4 stalks of celery (rinsed & cut in half), the lemon (rinsed & cut in half), the bay leaves and some salt and pepper in a large stock pot and cover with about 2 quarts of cold water. Bring this to a slow boil, turn down to low, cover and simmer for about 2 hours.
Remove your chicken and pour everything else through a strainer into another large pot. Discard all of the stuff, that ends up in the strainer. The goal here is to catch everything but the broth and end up with a pot full of, what I refer to as liquid gold (and yes, I know I'm weird). Voila, you have homemade broth. Don't be discouraged, if this doesn't taste like chicken soup yet, it gets better.

For the soup: Peel the rest of your carrots and slice into bite size circles, rinse and cut the rest of your celery into the same size pieces and add all this to the pot of broth. Get it going back on the stove on a slow simmer. Meanwhile you can get into removing the skin from your chicken and shredding the meat with two forks (make sure to get rid of all of the little bones and cartilage). Add the chicken meat to the simmering pot of goodness and cook until your veggies are tender. Give the whole thing a taste every once in a while and add salt and pepper, as needed. The soup should be done within about half an hour. If you feel like it, add some cooked noodles at the end or uncooked noodles, about 20 minutes in (if you choose to cook your noodles in the soup, you might have to add some more water, since pasta soaks up a lot of the broth). Enjoy and here's to health and better weather :)