(Leftover) Chicken Soup

As promised, here is the recipe that I used for making chicken soup out of roast chicken leftovers. This is a great follow-up meal to use up all your leftovers and keep from letting things go to waste. As a bonus, this is perfect cold-weather food.

What you'll need:
Roast chicken carcass
1-3 frozen chicken breasts, as needed (to augment the amount of meat)
1/2 c. sliced carrots (use roasted carrots if you can)
1 c. onion, cut into chunks (again, use roasted if you can)
1 c. chopped celery
1 bottle Guinness beer
48-60 oz. chicken broth (you'll want enough to cover the soup ingredients)
salt and pepper to taste

What you'll need to do:
1. In a large crock pot, add the chicken carcass (with bones), frozen chicken breasts, carrots, onion, celery, beer, and chicken broth.
2. Cook on LOW setting for 7-8 hours.
3. With a fork, shred large pieces of chicken and remove any bones. Add salt and pepper if needed.
4. Stir and serve with french bread or dinner rolls.

When you add the chicken carcass, you'll want to also include anything that roasted inside the chicken (herbs, garlic, etc.). This will bring great flavor to your soup. I actually didn't have to add any additional herbs or spices (not even salt and pepper) when I made this. You can also add pasta, barley, or other similar things as you like. I highly recommend eating your soup with a fresh loaf of sourdough bread if you can get it.

Sharing Sunday Dinner

I made roast chicken Sunday night for dinner, perfect comfort food for the cold weather. I used a slightly different recipe than the one I shared here. This time, it was like my mom makes at home with onion, garlic, and herbs stuffed inside. The veggies sharing the roasting pan are onion, carrots and yams. I had to share pictures because it looked so good. Here's a "before" and "after" of the bird of honor.

Before the roast

Ready to eat :)

Roasted vegetables are sooooo good! I'll be making chicken soup (recipe to come) with the leftovers tomorrow night, so stay tuned.

LibGuides: Into the Nitty-Gritty

I've posted about LibGuides before (see this post from several months ago). It's a content management system that allows librarians--or others--to present information to users in hopefully meaningful and useful ways. Often, LibGuides is used to create subject-based guides that are essentially digital pathfinders (tools to guide patrons or other users to where they can find information on a topic).

Different types of libraries find them useful for different things. Libraries for K-12 schools may use them to create a guide with information on a single topic like mythology or Algebra. Academic libraries that provide services for college-level students may take this concept one step further and create a guide to assist a single class; in this way the guide supports the specific assignments and curriculum for the class and becomes an additional resource the instructor can point students to. Public libraries seem to be the most varied in the use of LibGuides, and I've seen everything from subject guides on topics (similar to what academic and K-12 libraries do) to guides that outline library policy. Many libraries of all types will include their available databases on their guides.

Having been building and using LibGuides myself for some time (over 2 years now), I see some definite benefits to such a resource--if it's made to be meaningful to the intended audience. If you take some time to browse through the guides, you'll note that some are put together and just left, kind of a "fix it and forget it" mentality. I can see this as an option if it's for a class and the class never changes in terms of content or assignments, but for a lot of LibGuides I imagine that not actively maintaining them equates to a slow death as the resources become less and less viable for the intended audience. As with anything online, using LibGuides to create guides for your patrons is a commitment--one akin to keeping your library website up-to-date. As the needs of the audience changes, so too should the LibGuides. Once again, the needs of the user becomes a paramount consideration.

So why bring this up? It all ties in to my next two assignments for my Advanced Reference class. We've moved from providing reference services for a hypothetical reference question to analyzing databases to analyzing LibGuides and creating our own. We are in the process of currently learning about best practices for online subject guides in order to examine two published LibGuides made for the same topic and writing an analysis on how they each present the topic's information. I found two LibGuides created to provide information and resources on mythology, and while the amount of content is similar I'm already noticing some big differences on organization and the type of information/resources that are included. I'll probably be discussing more about LibGuides as I start the creation of my own guide (topic to be determined). As another kind of content management system, it does share some characteristics with other CMSs like Drupal (although Drupal has far fewer limitations and several other bonuses).

If you're interested in seeing how different libraries have used LibGuides, you can check out the community site for LibGuides published by subscribers.