Chicken Soup

My chicken soup - a work in progress.

I parboil the chicken bones one by one to melt out any excess fat and blood and transfer them to a pot of cold water which stops their cooking. Then I stew that for 2-4 hours skimming the muck that rises up. Bring to a boil and then turn the heat down to low/low-medium heat.

After that, you can take out the chicken throw it out or let it cool till you can pick off all the meat. You can leave it in for further stewing but then the meat falls apart with all the other ingredients and it becomes pretty hard to dig that stuff out.

I then add kosher salt, parsley stems (no leaf), some chopped carrots, uncut celery stalks, one quartered onion, one chopped potato, 8 white peppercorns + about an equal volume of sichuan pepper corns inside a tea ball, 4 dried longans, and dried goji berries. In this version, there is a Chinese Chicken soup medicine package that contained (according to the back label) Radix Discoreae (okay...), Codonopsis (haha), Astragalus (my what?), Lycium Berry (goji?), Arillus Lonagn (oops, did I get double Longan in my soup?), Lotus Seed, Dried Fox Nut (Ah, fox nuts. The nut of champions). I think one of those is ginseng as there were two ginseng looking sticks.

Stew that for another 1-2 hours. I save the carrots and potatos and strain the rest out, cool, refridgerate, degrease, heat, enjoy.