Ruth - I do that with the bones/carcass too! I make two kinds of stock depending on what I am making with the chicken meat. I'm ok with the boiled meat if I'm using it an dish with a strongly flavored sauce like a chicken mole. But usually I roast the chicken, save the carcass adn the pan drippings and make stock with it. Its something I used to do all the time at the restaurant because we roasted chicken for salads. I save my peelings and bits of veggies in the freezer - but usually I just put in whole onions, carrots, garlic, and celery which we have sitting around in the fridge. These days we make it in the slow cooker instead of on the stove too. So much easier.

Even a small container of cream goes bad in our house since we don't drink coffee. I'm finding that its easier this time around to give up the dairy (although I've not gone so far to refuse it when I'm not the one preparing the food - folks have a hard enough time with that low carb thing...lol)

Did you figure out what to make for the harvest holiday? (I can never remember how to say/spell that one but I remember our friends building the structure outside every year.) . I ahve a bunch of crockpot ideas but no real recipes: I like chicken stewed with artichokes and sundried tomatos, or a chicken/turkey/beef chili this time of year is great too. The ground meat can be made into small meatballs and cooked in a spanish or mexican tomato sauce. The recipe I have calls for mixing grated zuchini and mexican spices into the meat which makes for a moist meatball.

Yes, I made a bunch of things for Succos. I also asked for recipe ideas on a parenting website I frequent, and since it's an overall bigger website I got some more responses there.

I made an LC shepard's pie (somebody suggested regular shepard's pie so I made it with cauliflower in place of potatoes), a meatball stew (mixing almond meal in with the ground turkey in place of breadcrumbs), a couple of different roast chicken dishes (whole chicken stuffed with rice and surrounded by veggies- different choices of veggies and spices made for different flavors) and a beef and bean stew.

Then I got a nasty cold in the middle of Succos (the first two days are major holidays, the middle days are minor holidays, and the last two days are major holidays again. And this year the 2 days of major holidays were follwed immediately by Shabbos, 2 weeks in a row.) My throat burned so much that the only thing that felt good was carbs- not that I had many calories total but plain chicken soup just didn't go down as well as chicken soup with rice, and I NEEDED some honey in my tea!

For the last days of the holiday, I made a lot of roasted chicken (whole chickens were on sale) and some more 1-pot meals that had more carbs in them than my body is really used to. I think the homemade candy apples (so my kids don't get left out when they serve the artificially colored ones at shul) are what really did me in- a whole apple is a cheat to begin with, and when I eat one or two coated in candy it's not a good thing!

The end result is that I gained 3 lbs over the course of the week. I can't *not* serve some carbs for my kids, and it's easier for me to avoid them when they're not all in the same pot.

I'm now back to my normal eating habits and hopefully those pounds will come back off as easily as they crept on.