Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup

My Mom's Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup:

1 chicken thigh quarter (skin on, bone in)
8 oz (1/2 bag) egg noodles
1 can cream of chicken soup
8 to 10 cups water (estimated)

Fill up a large stock pot (8 quart) with water, and add a chicken quarter. Boil the chicken for a couple of hours, and then remove it from the pot. Add noodles and extra water to bring the pot to about 2/3 full (if needed). As the noodles are boiling skin the chicken, and then pull it off of the bone and into bite sized pieces. As the noodles finish add the chicken back in the pot and reheat through. Add the can of cream of chicken soup, and any water needed to make it as soupy as you like it. Keep in mind I do most of this by eyeballing it (water-wise) so you'll just have to play around with the water.

I got approximately nine 1-1/2 cup servings, at about 3 pts per cup. If you get 8 servings it's more like 4 pts/serving. A cup and a half serving is very ample.

Cost analysis:

Chicken - $3.00 per 10 lb bag at $0.27 per quarter. It was on mgr's special
Egg Noodles - $1.00 per 12 oz bag, I used 8 oz so approximately $0.64
Cream of Chicken soup - $0.49 per can
Water - negligible

Total pot of soup: $1.40
Per serving: $0.16

Admittedly this isn't a very exciting bowl of soup, but oh so yum when it's cold, rainy, and you're needing some comfort. Sometimes I like my chicken noodle soup more clear, and with onions, celery and carrots, but then sometimes I like the simplicity of this one. This is one of those that you just... do. It doesn't take measuring or anything, you just throw stuff in the pot and cook. Try it!

Indulge Me!

Hello, FG#2 here with a recipe I tried this evening and liked a lot and with a little of my ongoing weight loss philosophy. First, the recipe, which came out of the same magazine/book Laura mentioned in the preceding post. This one was the Chicken Sausage and Apples. The recipe called for McIntosh apples, but I had Granny Smiths (I love a tart apple!), so that's what I used. It would certainly be a bit more colorful with a red apple, or even a combination of apples if you wanted to get really creative! Anyway, a 1 cup serving of this recipe is 3 points. The recipe said I'd get six servings and I did, so I ate one for dinner and froze the rest in one-serving sizes in freezer bags.

It doesn't look like a whole lot, but that's kind of a big bowl, and that and a 1/2 cup serving of couscous (okay I pair weird stuff, and leftover couscous is what I had in the fridge, though the recipe suggested a mashed sweet potato) was certainly filling enough.

I didn't do a complete cost analysis, but I bought the apples and onions by the bag, so they weren't expensive. The cost for the 1/4 cup of apple juice was negligible as well. The costly part was the sausage, and I figured that out to be 93 cents per serving. I'd estimate that the apples (three), onion (one), juice, and thyme (I used 1 tsp dried thyme) cost around a dollar or less, so this entree cost approximately $2, and was easily prepared in 15-20 minutes. That's good, since the magazine promised 90-some 15-minute meals (the other day I made a chicken posole chili from the same magazine, and although the actual chili took maybe 15 minutes, that didn't take into account the time needed to cook and shred the chicken, but even so, we're talking meals you can make pretty quickly).

So, what about my philosophy? Laura has certainly heard me whine enough about how I hate keeping track of points for food, activity, etc. I don't know why my psyche resists this. It's akin to the way my brain shuts down when someone starts talking about taxes and other stuff involving numbers. Sometimes I think it's just that for so many years I lived a very regimented life (due to long commutes, etc.) that I rebel against that sort of thing now, or maybe it's just that my aging brain doesn't want to work that hard. Maybe it's a little of both. Who knows?

I certainly understand the purpose of tracking points, but what to do if one doesn't want to track points? Well, I'm about to find out. I'm a scientist by training, so I am not averse to a little experimentation. I know the Weight Watchers system works, so the question is whether I can modify it to indulge my internal resistance to tracking numbers. Why points? I think for a lot of folks, it's just easier than thinking about and tracking calories, fat, fiber, etc. WW has taken that work out of things by assigning the points values to various foods based on those factors. Laura has a mind that's more than a decade younger than mine and she has no trouble keeping track of the points values for a huge number of foods. I, on the other hand, seem to be experiencing the sort of brain fade so eloquently (and scarily) discussed in the book Carved in Sand by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin--I, who memorized my way through the classifications of species in college, had no trouble learning hundreds of chemical reactions (and their names) in chemistry, and who could tell you on what page of a textbook specific information would be found, can't remember my own name half the time (okay, slight exaggeration, but not by much), let alone the points values on a gazillion different foods. I know, I know, there are booklets with all that information listed (I have them) and gadgets that let you calculate all that (I have them too), and yet I don't want to drag those things out every time I want to eat something. And so, even though in my heyday I was the Queen of Memorizing All Sorts of Stuff, I find myself struggling with this whole thing. I don't know if there are other folks out there who have this same problem, but the fact is that my brain is just plain resisting this stuff! So I am going to work around that, hence my experiment.

In my mind WW has really turned portion control, calorie (etc.) counting, and all that into a series of numbers (points) that makes it easy for people to keep track of what they're putting in and what they're taking out (in the form of activity). The whole program is really about teaching people how to recognize healthy foods (or cook in a more healthy way) and normal portions, in a way that's easy for most people (except the brain resisters like me) to use on a daily basis. Make it easy and people will stick with it. And it works. It's worked for me, so I'm not saying all this from some sort of sour grapes perspective, either.

So for the time being, my experiment is this: I will pay attention to points for the stuff whose points I remember and for the recipes I try and so on, but I am not going to be a slave to points (in other words, I will have a fairly close daily idea of the number of points I've ingested, but I'm not going to keep an exact count--for example I already know how many points my normal breakfast is and it's pretty much unchanging). Instead I am going to try to be a little more free form, while exercising portion control and simply increasing my intake of the things that I know are low points or no points and severely limiting the stuff that I know would be high-point-value items (you know, cookies, fudge, bacon cheese fries, most fast food, butter, cheese--oh dear, that one is going to be hard!). When I want something sugary, I will reach for an apple or banana or other piece of fruit. I'm not a big salty snack fan, so that's really an issue for me. Really my biggest problem is sweets. I stopped eating most sweets, and especially chocolate, before Thanksgiving and lost 10 pounds very quickly. Note that I didn't stop eating all sweets, just most. I will indulge in the occasional plate of bacon cheese fries with Laura.

I'm already pretty active with life here on the farm, but I can increase that activity by adding in regular "programmed" exercise. Let's face it, my body is used to lifting and carrying bales of hay, bags of feed, full buckets of water and so on. So in the greater picture, even though I'm already active, I need to find ways to increase my activity, and that pretty much means regimented exercise. I stopped jogging during hunting season, but it's safe (relatively speaking) to go back in the woods (well, the nursery where I like to jog), so I'll be heading back out with the dogs in the mornings. I can also spend some time on toning exercises. Heck, I'm unemployed--I ought to have all the time in the world to exercise, right?

Anyway, this post has already gotten quite long, but this is the way I want to try to lose weight. I'm going to give it a couple of months and if it's not working, then I'll cry my mea culpa and get religious about strictly following the WW way. But for now, I'm going to experiment with this slightly more lax version and see what happens. (I'm certainly not recommending that the rest of the world do this, because it will be very easy to slip into old habits and the like, but weight loss is really about lifestyle change and I really don't plan to spend the rest of my life counting points even if I had to do so in the short term, so I figure why not jump straight to the part where I just try to live the lifestyle change and see if it works for me? I mean, really, I know what I should be eating, and I need to just do it.)

Cost Analysis on a Recipe

One of the things that Julie, Robin and I have talked about is how eating healthy and fresh foods can be much more expensive than going with unhealthy and packaged foods. One of my goals is to find ways to stretch my food budget while losing weight, but yet keep it healthy and fresh. This can be a rather daunting task.

Julie and I both bought a Weight Watchers 5 Ingredients 15 Minutes cookbook last week. It’s one of the “Time” issues that looks like a magazine. Anyway, I’ve not been through it with a fine-toothed comb but one of the things I like is that it uses time saving techniques. However, it also relies on a good bit of pre-made or packaged foods that are usually expensive. But by and large the recipes look good and healthy, but it will take some tweaking to make it cost effective. I’ve always been a firm believer in stocking a good pantry, and in choosing to make things that will make the MOST use of the items as well, so that's part of the strategy to keeping costs down in general.

While there are some recipes in the book that don't make good financial sense to me (or just didn't appeal to my taste buds) I tried a recipe from my new cookbook this week that turned out quite inexpensive, and very tasty. It’s a Sausage and White Bean Soup, and I did tweak it slightly. I doubled the recipe, changed out a few comparable ingredients and so on. Based on doubling the recipe according to the book it should have made 10 servings. However, my practical experiment yielded 8. I suppose one could make up the slack with two adding in two more cups of water, but I really liked it as it was. The point count listed is 2 per 1 cup serving, but my yield was 3 per 1 cup serving based on 2 fewer total servings (I plugged it in to my WW online recipe builder). Here is what I spent:

Notes: The original cost is the amount paid for the total item, such as the bag of potatoes, or the package of sausage. The cost used is the cost figured for how much of the item I used. Also note that technically I should have used TWO green peppers - but that seemed to be overkill to me. I don't love peppers enough to want two in there.

Also for dinner I had:

1 baked potato at $1.99/bag and $0.25 / one serving
2 Tbsp Light Sour Cream a $0.89 / carton and $0.06 / serving
1 skinny cow ice cream at $2.99 / carton and $0.50 / serving
ton o salt on baked potato / negligible

Dinner total: $1.35
Points total: 9 (would have been 7 without the ice cream)

The soup includes 1 serving of vegetables

Other cost information: Total money spent on ingredients is $11.88 but the total of what was used from the ingredients is $5.19. Ingredients were bought on sale, or at Aldi.

In my book any time I can spend $0.56 on a serving of soup I'm happy. A 1 cup serving of a similar soup at the grocery store will cost a person approximately $1.25.