chris is sick. really sick. i gather from speaking with him about it that this happens about once a decade. i, on the other hand, have spent some large nontrivial amount of time in my life really sick, so in preparation for probably 4 hours from now when i come down with what he came down with yesterday, i'm making a big pot of chicken soup.
this inspired me to look up one of my all-time favorite pieces of primary research, linked to below. even though i have almost no understanding of the dependent measure, i love it anyway, and i get the point - when in doubt, buy progresso (its too hard to keep track of all of the different kinds of campbell's) and never, never ramen.
Clean the chicken, put it in a large pot, and cover it with cold water. Bring the water to a boil. Add the chicken wings, onions, sweet potato, parsnips, turnips, and carrots. Boil about 1.5 h. Remove fat from the surface as it accumulates. Add the parsley and celery. Cook the mixture about 45 min longer. Remove the chicken. The chicken is not used further for the soup. (The meat makes excellent chicken parmesan.) Put the vegetables in a food processor until they are chopped fine or pass through a strainer. Both were performed in the present study. Salt and pepper to taste. (Note: this soup freezes well.) Matzoh balls were prepared according to the recipe on the back of the box of matzoh meal (Manischewitz; Jersey City, NJ).
Three separate preparations of soup were made. The completed soup was collected from all three. In addition, in order to determine at which stage the soup acquired activity, 19 samples were collected during the preparation of one batch (Table 1 ). As the mixture was inhomogeneous, several samples were collected at the same time from different regions of the pot. All samples were frozen in small aliquots and stored (-80°C) until assay.