The Fruit of Monday's Labor

I started my cooking day by preparing ingredients for homemade chicken stock. I did you a favor and left out the chicken carcasses from the picture. I used 2 chicken carcasses (and all the ingredients in the picture below) and added 7 cups of water (to cover the ingredients). Then simmered for about 5 hours (sometimes with the lid, sometimes without). Sadly, I lost a bit of it to the sink, but we still had enough for our dinner....our soup was just a bit more chunky than I had planned.

I made this French bread next. One of these loaves was for the meatball sandwiches we had yesterday, and the other is temporarily living in the freezer. Not sure when it will be used, but homemade bread doesn't usually last too long around here. 

The following apple peanut butter snack bars are a new recipe for me. Next time I will try cooking them for 25 minutes instead of 20, but other than that they are great! I keep them in the fridge for a healthy breakfast or snack. So much better for you than almost any (or maybe EVERY) form of granola bar-type product you could buy in the store.  

Pretzel rolls! They didn't get the signature dark brown color I was looking for, but they were delicious (still have 2 more!). I'm not going to share the recipe now because I also want to give a new recipe a try. Once I know which one is better I will share my favorite.

Ginger bread muffins - yum yum! I didn't think they weren't too ginger bread-y, but still quite a tasty and healthy breakfast muffin. I used canola oil instead of coconut oil, and went with an almost full 1/3 cup blackstrap molasses, which was the high end of the range suggested. 

Here is the chicken soup! I mixed things up a little and added some fresh lemon juice and fresh parsley to this. The chicken had been baked with lemon, so I thought I would stick with that for the soup. There isn't many things that are better than a homemade chicken soup! Especially this time of year : ) 

I love love love the days when I can spend a large portion of my day in the kitchen. Therapeutic for me, fills up the freezer, and fills our stomachs with delicious, homemade, usually healthy food. I'm becoming more and more leery of store bought products and all of the ingredients that I can't pronounce. So the more food that can come out of my kitchen the better! Oh so much better! : )