A Good Day for Chicken Soup

Good afternoon!!

It's a gray, cold, very windy Southern California afternoon.  It was and is supposed to be raining, but it is not.  We Californians do get cynical about predictions of rain; it's understandable when they miss the mark so often.

A radio talk show host, Tim Conway Jr, was betting people last night that not one drop of rain would fall in Los Angeles today though the prospect was 100% for rain.  I'm with him, but maybe not quite so drastically.  When it says 20% chance of rain, however, I always feel that the chances are better than a prediction of 80%.  I don't know why it should be true, I just know it so often happens that way.

I am fighting, not a cold, but an attack of the Flowering Ornamental Pear Trees.  They are beautiful small trees, and in February they're covered by a snowstorm of white blooms, tinted with chartreuse here and there.  Lovely to look at, but don't get too close (some in every block is too close!)

So I decided to get some chicken and make a soup for tonight.  For some reason I can no longer buy a reasonably sized package of cut up chicken. There are either large packages of thighs, large packages of legs, or packages of boneless breasts. I LIKE BONES.  So I bought a package of about twenty wings, yes, wings--bought in desperation.  Put them into a saucepan with a quart and a half of water, a large carrot cut in six pieces, a large piece of a large onion cut into small pieces, a clove of garlic minced, a few dried herbs, a shake of garlic salt--and about a half cup of cut up tired celery.  All of that boiled gently away, and then I went in and took out the wings with my tweakers and laid them on a plate. Then I cut up a largish Mexican squash and put those pieces in.   When the wings cooled off enough to trim, I took out the bones and took off the skin.  I had a pile of scraps about as big as the meat, but que vale? The meat was bite size and succulent, and I put it back into the pot with a couple of small handfuls of twisted pasta, and then I forgot about it. Oh, and I cut some cilantro and some parsley from the yard and threw those in. The soup is delicious and it will make a great supper in about two hours. 
Wing-skin is greasy and I have been trying to skim a lot of fat off the top of the soup with a large spoon.  It's hard to do but I have to because "I had a heart attack," you know.  Simper.
I can't tell you how yummy that soup tastes. I have had perfectly good chicken soup that tasted bitter from black pepper, or lacked salt, or had that thin feathery taste that it can get--but this soup has none of the above.  It is perfect. YAZZYBEL