Their Last Supper?

Okay, so being the youngest of 5, with 3 older sisters isn't ALWAYS a good thing. It means that I never learned how to cook. I took advantage of the situation too, let me tell you! I hated to cook then, I hate to cook now. I am not one of those people who can add a little of this or a little of that. I need a recipe with nearly every detail written out.

While I was home last week, when I was visiting with my sister, Kim, we somehow got onto the topic of food. She was telling me about a recipe she has for homemade chicken with noodles. I love homemade chicken with noodles. Well, I love my Mom's homemade chicken with noodles. I've been begging her to fix them each time we are planning to come home and it never seems to work out. She's either out of commission because of back to back surgeries, or it's just too much with all of the other chaos going on with 20 some people in the house. I thought, well, if Kim can make that, surely I can make that. I only say that because she never learned how to cook at home either, and could have written a cookbook after she got married on 1,001 ways to make hot dogs. Thankfully her husband, J.L., is a good cook and has taught her well. Anyway, she wrote out her recipe for me on Facebook and I wrote them all down with plans to make a yummy Easter dinner tomorrow of homemade chicken with noodles. Kim's recipe, although it seemed easy to do by reading it, is a 2-day process. Day 1 requires you to cook the chicken all day in the crockpot with chicken broth and cream of mushroom soup. We had some chicken for supper tonight, and then afterwards it says to pick the rest of the chicken off of the bone and get all of the bones out of the crockpot, then refrigerate until tomorrow. When I attempted to get some chicken out of the crockpot for supper, it was so tender it was falling off of the bone. That's a good thing, but that's also a bad thing. Now I have 100's of chicken bones loose in the crockpot. And, the recipe didn't tell me to remove the neck from the open body cavity so I didn't. UGH! I wonder how many vertebrae a chicken has? TOO MANY! I have been fishing bones out all evening and panicking that this isn't going to turn out. I think I found the liver and the gizzard, along with some white lumpy cartilage or something (I hate dealing with raw meat, and this cooked chicken was almost as disgusting!) After posting on Facebook about the situation and asking what I should do, I attempted to strain the bones out with the colander, but there was so little juice and so much meat, etc that it really didn't help all that much. I finally ended up going through all of the meat by hand trying to find the bones. There were some that were so small that I know there's no way that I got all of them out. How am I going to live with myself if my kids choke to death on a chicken vertebrae? Or worse yet, a scapula? I have heard of people choking to death on chicken bones. I'm going to have to make sure they chew their food very well so they can pick out any bones I may have missed. Hopefully it won't be their last supper!

The other things I decided to fix are also recipes that I have never made before, i.e. deviled eggs and Mom's potato salad. I sure hope Perkins is open tomorrow!