Home made chicken soup

I make this quite often. It's quite a process, so I make a huge pot of it. We live on it for a few days and I freeze it.

First I boil 5 lbs of chicken in my biggest pot. When it's done, I cool it for a bit, and then strip the meat off the bones. The bones go back into the pot and stew for a few hours. I then strain out the bones for a clear broth. At this point I would add chicken base to the stock to taste. However, chicken base has wheat starch in it, so I have to use beef base. I chop onions(about 3 large) and carrots(2 lbs?) and celery( 4-5 stocks) very fine, throw it into the pot and bring to a boil, add the meat, and then I add a package of rice noodles, bring to a good rolling boil, cover soup and turn off the heat. Let it sit for 20 minutes, and enjoy. I also use brown or white rice from time to time, but allow for more cooking time at the end.

For me this is an all day affair. It's very healthy, boiling the bones adds calcium to our diets, and that's good because we don't use very much milk anymore.

After doing all the reading recently about how chickens are factory farmed, we have decided to purchase locally grown meat. This was the last of the grocery store chicken in my freezer. I'm thinking in the future, the soup may have more soup base in it and less real meat, cause I know we are going to be paying way more for chicken. We tried going vegetarian for awhile, but all that soy and beans is very gas producing, and it was a relief to eat meat for protein and have our bodies get back to normal. So, we just eat a lot less meat than we used to. I do think of our animal friends, and while I know growing them for food is not ideal, it can be done humanly.

PS, I forgot to add the PARSLEY! And a bit of garlic. But lots of parsley, preferable fresh.