I still don’t have much of an appetite.  I brought stuff to make a smoothie for breakfast yesterday morning, but after drinking some coffee I just didn’t feel like it.  I wasn’t hungry, I was still coughing and the thought of having food in my stomach while coughing, well, made me feel sick to my stomach.

Finally around 1:00 I knew I had to eat something, so I had some of Hannah’s leftover chicken noodle soup.  The only thing I did was add some sriracha to the broth to spice it up some to help open up my sinuses.  Delish!

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Blog reader Joanne asked for mine or Hannah’s recipe for chicken noodle soup, and well the quick answer is neither of us, or my Mom or grandma ever really used one.  Chicken soup is one of those “eye ball” recipes that don’t really follow any recipe.  Hannah used 12 cups of chicken broth.  She sauteed about 3 large carrots and 4 stalks of chopped celery in about a tablespoon of butter for about 8 minutes.  She added that to the broth that had been simmering over medium heat, then she pulls all of the white meat off of a rotisserie chicken, throws that in the pot, then adds 16 ounces of wide egg noodles and simmers the noodles for about 15-20 minutes over medium heat.  Once the noodles are cooked, she pulls it off the heat, adds pepper (no salt needed because of the broth) and dried parsley.  That’s it.  So delicious!  The only think I do differently, is that I start out simmering the carcass of the chicken to make my stock, but her method is a lot quicker.

I still don’t have much energy to cook in the kitchen.  I decided to pick up dinner on my way home from work and ended up getting Tom Yum soup.  It’s a spicy soup with lemongrass, baby spinach, tomato, mushrooms and I got shrimp.  I also ordered steamed noodles on the side and added 1/2 a coup of that to my soup.

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I took this picture when it was light out, but still wasn’t hungry yet.  Truth be told, I never actually ate that.  I finally had a few pretzels around 8:30 and went to bed at 10:00.  I did only get up once in the night to cough so hopefully that’s a sign that I am on the mend.  Although when I went to bed last night, Hannah was starting to cough so I hope I didn’t spread my germs to her.  Tonight when I get home I am going to wash my sheets and Lysol the whole house.

I can’t believe today marks the 14th year of 9/11.  It’s one of the reasons I don’t work in Chicago anymore.  Tony was worried that after New York the terrorists were going to target other major cities and he told me that no one could fly a plane into an office building in the suburbs.  That day I got off the train at 8:30 and was headed to my office on north Michigan Avenue.  I was running a bit late and believe it or not just walked on by when I saw everyone at the train station in one of the bars that had t.v.’s going and never even gave it a second thought as to what everyone was looking at.  I then had to take the water taxi from the train station to Michigan Avenue and by the time I got to my desk it was 9:00 and people in my office were in the conference room watching t.v. and that’s when I saw what was happening.  Within ten minutes they closed our office and told us to go home. 

It was a sea of humanity walking back to the train station and because there were so many people I didn’t actually make it to my stop until 1:00 in the afternoon.  I went and picked up Hannah at school and I have to say I handled the situation very badly.  She was just excited to see me pick her up at school and I was just a mess trying to figure out what the hell was actually happening.  She looked at me all happy and said “are we doing something fun today?” and I remember looking at her saying “no Hannah, so many people died today!” and I started crying.  Hannah and I talked about that the other day and I apologized for my behavior.   She was 9 years old but she remembers that day like it was yesterday.  Obviously as she got older we talked about the significance of 9/11 but it wasn’t until recently that I told her I was sorry that I didn’t explain things as I should have that day.

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