Random Thoughts on a Sunday Afternoon...

I've been pretty under the weather for the last few days, but modern medicine seems to be helping me out so far today so I figured I'd better post while I'm feeling up to it... Plus, this way I can blame the excessively random nature of this post on the fact that my head is all fuzzy... Here are my random thoughts for the day:

Speaking of being sick, it usually takes me a few days after I hit rock bottom to start taking any kind of cold medicine. I don't know if it's because I'm a scientist or just fundamentally screwed up in some way, but I tend to find my symptoms sort of fascinating, and I feel like if I take medicine then I won't be able to gage how sick I really am. Am I the only person who does this?
I saw a blind man jaywalking across a very busy street on Thursday. This strikes me as a really bad idea. I have some friends (you know who you are) who I used to mock for refusing to jaywalk even on quiet Santa Barbara streets, but even a hard-core jaywalker like myself wouldn't venture out into the middle of a busy street if I couldn't see what was coming at me... Crazy.
So, I think there are two kinds of pet owners in this world. There are the kind who find out that their pet rabbits are deathly afraid of the smell of cooking chicken and thus decide that they will never again make chicken stock (which fills the house with lovely chicken and ginger aromas for 2 hours), and there are the kind who aren't feeling well and think some Chinese Chicken Noodle Soup with homemade chicken stock* would be the perfect remedy, even if it means that the bunnies are huddled in the corner of their cage in fear for 2 hours. My feeling is that they just need to get over it. I went ahead and did laundry (which also freaks them out a bit) at the same time just to get all of the badness over with at once. Fish sauce and cooked chicken are the two aromas that scare the crap out of them. I've come up with a few theories, but their brains are very very tiny, so who am I to try to figure out what they're thinking...
Poor little guys... Below is a picture of what the bunnies looked like for the first hour and a half that the stock was simmering, after which I think they decided that if I was going to add them to the pot I probably would have done it already:
Homemade chicken stock is pretty amazing, but definitely takes a chunk of time so I pretty much only make it when it is going to be the highlight of a dish. I'm sure all of the things I make that involve chicken stock would taste better with homemade stock instead of the boxed stuff, but I'm not sure the improvement would be worth all the extra time... For this soup, though, the stock is definitely the star. While the stock is coming to a boil I prep bowls filled with chicken (I used $5 rotisserie chickens from Costco for the carcasses in the stock, and reserved the meat from one of those to use in the soup), bok choy, scallions, cilantro, red chillies, hokkien noodles, and a drizzle of sesame oil. When the stock is finished, you can season it with oyster sauce, sugar, and soy sauce then ladle it into these bowls for a yummy healthy chicken noodle soup, guaranteed to make any sick person feel a little better...
*I'm not going to bother posting this on my recipe page because it's really simple: Put 3 chicken carcasses in a large pot with ~16 scallions (halved crosswise), 2 small red onions (roughly chopped), a ~4-inch piece of ginger (sliced), ~10 cloves of garlic (crushed), and ~8 liters of water. Bring to a boil and simmer for ~2 hours. Remove solids, then remove fat either by using a fat separator or by refrigerating and skimming the fat from the top. For soup, heat 8 cups of stock and combine with 2-3 tablespoons soy sauce, 1 tablespoon oyster sauce, and a teaspoon of sugar. Ladle over chicken, noodles, and veggies to serve.