A few firsts

In the last 18 hours or so, I've had a few firsts, and one of them is particularly cool, so I thought I'd write a post about it.

1. First homemade chicken stock!
2. First 20-min. jog!
3. Began reading "Gone with the Wind" finally!

So, for number one, I will write a separate food blog post, but suffice it to say that I had a chicken carcass sitting in my fridge, so I made some stock using recipes from Ina Garten and an Italian cookbook by the guy that the movie "Goodfellas" is based on. Basically you boil the chicken carcass in water, adding lots of garlic, thyme, parsley, onions, bay leaves, peppercorns, and carrots. It happily simmered for hours, and then I strained it and it was done!

I should clarify that mine wasn't exactly classic - I added a little more flavor by roasting some leftover beef and venison bones, then added those to the stock also. The beef was from a steak that my mom gave me, which I made steak tacos with last night. The venison was frozen from over the winter, when I made my venison pot roast.

The stock smelled awesome; I'm definitely going to have to make this in the winter. It was really easy, too.

My other firsts are from this morning - I did a run as part of my 5K training, and it was cool to run that long. I actually am getting to not hate running so much anymore.

I also started reading "Gone with the Wind," which, of course, is impressing me with its wildly racist language and other endearing descriptions of southerners who "don't like no book learnin'." Still, Mitchell is a beautiful writer, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

AND, it was the Daley Center farmers' market today, and I got two beautiful organic heads of lettuce - Boston and red leaf - and some almond butter, dried blueberries, and clover-honey cheese. Needless to say, I'm pretty excited.