Roasting chicken bones makes a dark and flavorful stock for soups and stews and is easy to make, but it's also easy to forget to make. Recently Jedd has been buying whole chickens at the store and breaking them down when he gets home. He separates the meat into different bags and then stows the carcass in the freezer. I've been getting better about saving various vegetable peels and cuttings and I've been freezing those as well. So, although we've been really good about preparing to make more homemade stock, we've been lousy about just doing it.

Until today. that is, when I opened the freezer and couldn't maneuver our ice cube trays out because we have so much packed in there. So, I pulled out a bag of chicken, frozen parsley stems, leek cuttings and dill, turned the oven on, and started roasting.

Ah, it's still cold and gray. So, combining my need for beauty with my need for warmth, I decided to use the beautiful, locally-grown apples Jedd found recently in a soup along with a leftover Butternut squash. And what would make the soup even more gorgeous? Some curry and some chili powder.

The soup was sweet, spicy hot and pretty. There's not a whole lot more you can ask of a February meal.

Jedd made some amazing parmesan/black pepper bread the other day and I decided to make a soup to finish the bread off with. I wanted to do something with a mellow flavor so that the bread could shine, but this simple little celery soup would have been fantastic on its own. And it's a little lower in fat too, because I didn't add any cream to it. Honestly, the only soup I ever add cream to is vichyssoise because once you blend a soup it gets creamy on its own. However, all of the calories I could have saved were negated because I sauteed the vegetables in delicious butter.

Mmmmm, barley. Barley is a hidden star in this soup. The leeks preen and the chicken poses, but the barley quietly ties it all together, making for a hearty, filling soup recipe.