Homemade Chicken Soup (Allie never posts!)

So since this blog is titled "allinny" Ginny reminded me that I'm expected to contribute, despite my lack of blogging skills and experience (Ginny, check it out, I'm blogging!). So here's my first contribution, a very delicious chicken soup. I'm a big fan of making soups because they're easy and don't take a lot of time, and you can usually get a lot of meals out of them, as well as a pretty balanced meal all in one dish. I've been wanting to make a chicken soup for a while that involved more than just opening a box of chicken stock and adding vegetables, and I finally did last week. I made a chicken soup with carrots, celery, and onion (a lot of onion, actually). The result was pretty good, although there were some kinks I want to work out the next time. This is what I did:

1) first I made the chicken stock. I'd never done this before and I wasn't following a recipe, but I figured it couldn't be that hard. It wasn't, but it took a long time. So I just boiled two chicken legs (with skin) in a big pot of water, along with half a large spanish onion, sliced into big pieces. Before boiling I cooked the chicken and onions a little bit over medium heat just to get them going. Once the water was boiling, I added 2 stalks of diced celery to it, as well as 1 large bay leaf, although really I think 2 would have been better. Then I boiled the broth covered for about 2 hours.

Once the chicken was falling off the bone, I took it out and removed the meat, discarding the skin and bones. Then I strained the broth and chilled it overnight, and removed the fat solids from the top of the broth the next day.

2) The next part was easy. I heated the broth, adding 1/2 a spanish onion, two celery stalks, and 2 carrots to the soup. The onion was really big, so I ended up with a lot of it in the soup, but I like it that way. Once the vegetables were almost tender I added matzo balls and simmered for about 15-20 minutes before adding the chicken back in. Once the chicken was heated through, I deemed it ready to serve.

The soup was really quite good, although I did have to add some storebought broth to get a better flavor to it. This was probably due to an error in my stock-making proccess, but I'm not sure what that was. I'm going to fiddle around with it and see what happens next time.

Other serving suggestions:
I used matzo balls from a mix, which you can find pretty easily in any grocery store. Leaving the soup plain, without the matzo balls was good too, and I'm sure noodles would be excellent as well. Also, making the soup with chicken breast instead of the legs is a healthier option. I didn't add a lot of spices to the soup, just some salt and pepper during the second cooking time.