Pig’s Feet and Chicken Soup

When I came in from working in the garage it hit me like a pie in the face only better. It was the distinctive aroma of chicken soup cooking on the stove. Homemade chicken soup in the making to be more precise. I had set a picked-over rotisserie chicken in water to boil the meat from the bones which is something I only do two-three a year. For the next seven or eight minutes I stood over the pot, straining and picking bones and skin out of the boiling broth, my cheeks getting red from the steam, my hair getting frizzy. I cut some mini-peeled carrots up like little orange dimes and added them into the pot followed by a couple of envelopes of Lipton Vegetable Soup and Dip Mix. I would have used their chicken soup mix but I’m trying to use up pantry items so my “cooking” between now and when I move will be---shall we say---more creative than usual. I had a third of a bag of Amish extra wide country noodles to use up so they got tossed in the pot as well. Ya, I admit it, I cheat like crazy when I “cook.” And while my soup looked and tasted really good, I’d never serve it to anyone or drop off a container to someone who is sick. I’d never trust that I got every little bone strained out and if someone is going to die from getting a bone stuck in their throat it’s going to be me. I eat my chicken soup very slowly, letting my tongue be the finally judge on whether or not I got every bone out before swallowing. With this batch I never did find the wish bone which makes me wonder if the universe was trying to tell me something. No more wishes for you, Old Lady! You’ve wished your life away.

My mom made a lot of soups---good soups---and she never used a recipe. I did the watch-and-learn exercise a couple of times trying to root out her secrets. But she never measured the spices or other ingredients she used and she always incorporated left-overs into soups so I never got a single recipe out of my once serious attempt to write down Mom’s recipes. And to this day there was one spice she used in just about everything soup and stew that I still can’t identify. It looked like baby spiders floating on the top and growing up that’s the only name I knew it by. "But Mom I've got spiders in my soup!" I once complained. "Just eat them,” she replied. “They're dead!" I’ve written about her ‘spider spice’ before so if this sounds familiar you’re not imagining it. I’m old and I’m starting to repeat myself.

Trying to learn how to cook from my mom was an impossible task---at least for me. My brother didn’t seem to have the same trouble as I did. He’s always been a better cook than me and he's has a lot more experience doing it than I’ve had. He started cooking in his teens, eager to learn, and I had to be brought to the stove kicking and screaming when I was that age. Mom would tell me I was never going to get a husband if I didn’t learn to cook. But it was her fault that I was in my twenties before I could even identify cuts of meat which was a problem back in the day when you had to tell a butcher what you wanted from the other side of the glass case. Growing up, when I’d ask my mom what she was cooking she’d say things like, “An old dead pig” or “road kill” or “an old dead cow.” To the best of my knowledge we never ate road kill but for some reason Mom thought it was funny to make me eat mystery meat. At my brother's house, however, if he told me he was cooking road kill I would 100% believe him.

Fast forward through the years I still can’t scratch cook and I really don’t care anymore. But I did go through ‘70s getting good at baking bread. Then again in this century I was doing artisan breads until I had to stop because of my husband’s diabetes. I’m looking forward to getting back into baking after I move. I’ll be the apartment from which delicious smelling breads will seep into the hallway every Sunday. I just hope I don’t acquire a neighbor who cooks pig’s feet and sauerkraut. My mom cooked that combo often in fall and, boy, did that stink up the house when my mom boiled the crap out of them. (And, no, we don’t have a drop of Polish blood in our ancestry.) Can you even buy pig’s feet in the supermarkets these days? That was about the only meat I could identify growing up. Those and chicken necks. 

Talk about tiny bones that can choke you I do wonder, now, why my mom bothered boiling batches of chicken necks. Maybe we were poorer than I thought we were? I do know Mom must have had a better way of straining the bones out of broths than I do because to be best of my recollection no one ever had a near death experience at our dinner table and I don’t recall her ever warning us to be on the lookout for bones. I found two in the bowl of soup I ate today. Just sayin' there are some tricks I wish I had learned back in the days when I had to use a step stool to peer into the pot cooking on Mom's stove. ©