Using the largest pot you have, fill half of it with chicken parts (legs and thighs make the most flavorful soup). 

 I buy the 10 pound bag of leg quarters and use 6 leg quarters in each pot of soup. At our little Rainbow store, the bag costs $6.00 (!!), so that’s $3.60 in the pot so far. You don’t need to skin or debone the chicken, because once the soup is done, the chicken will literally fall apart.

 Peel about 10 carrots...

 I use a 2 pound bag of carrots. There are usually around 14 carrots in the bag, but some are awfully small. Look at all that beautiful compost material!

 …and add to chicken.

I cut each carrot into 3 or 4 pieces before adding them to the pot. A 2 pound bag of these orange beauties costs $1.99.

Add about two large onions, a few stalks of celery and some parsley. NOTE: Onions, celery and parsley should not be used at the start of the dietary regimen because the fibrous parts of these vegetables may cause problems.

You will notice that none of the above resides in the pot. That’s how it’s going to be until we figure out what works for us. The resulting soup (minus those three ingredients) is quite tasty, but I know that adding onions and celery will up the flavor factor.

Season with salt.

Fill pot with water.

I fill the pot until the water is one inch from the top.

Simmer for about 4 hours.

I start by putting the soup on the highest heat possible, to get a good boil going. Once it’s reached that point, lower the heat to a medium level. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Here’s what you will see:

Not very pretty, huh? At this point, I “scrape” the accumulated fat from the top layer of the soup. I use a metal pasta spoon to do this. I continue to check the soup about every 30 minutes, until the four hours are up. I tend to add between one and two cups of additional water during the cooking process.

Puree carrots in blender and return to broth.

I remove the carrots from the soup pot and spoon them into the blender, along with two or three ladles of the broth. This helps to liquefy the carrots and makes it easier to mix them back in at the end.

Strain soup through a colander or strainer.

Remove skin from chicken parts and return to broth.

This step should really say “Remove skin and bones from chicken parts.” This process is not hard, since the meat literally falls off the bone. I like to spread the chicken out on a baking sheet and pick things out that way. Seems to make the process a bit quicker and it’s definitely a thorough method.

This is the final product.

Some would call it bland, but I like to think that it’s a very clean tasting soup – without all of the additives you get in commercially produced food, you can truly appreciate the flavor of chicken and carrots. From one pot, I get almost 8 quarts, which I store in mason jars in the fridge.

At a total cost of $5.59 for a full pot, that's only $0.35 a serving. You can't beat that.

Along with the soup, the first week of the diet also allows homemade yogurt; dry curd cottage cheese; boiled, poached or scrambled eggs; homemade gelatin; broiled beef patty or broiled fish; the SCD cheesecake; and limited amounts of apple cider or grape juice, mixed half-and-half with water.

I’m not sure that dry curd cottage cheese is something I’ll be able to get around here, but I’m going to try some of the health food stores and see if they have any suggestions.

I will be making yogurt today as well and will have a separate post on that process.