As a kid, I'd be out all day in the winter cold. It might be doing chores on the farm (which I couldn't wait to finish and get in the house, it's cold!), or it might be playing (which I could spend hours and had to be pert near drug into the house, it's not that cold!).

Either way, I was pretty sure Mom had the perfect prescription for those bitterly cold winter days.

Hot chicken soup.

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Now, I know most of us have said 'Oh, it's good, but it ain't like Ma used to make'. In this case, tis true. I've never tasted chicken soup as good as Mom made. So what was her secret?

Well...uh...I'm pretty sure she started with a chicken. After that? I never bothered to ask. I was too busy eatin'!

And these weren't those fancy store-bought birds, either.

Oh, I remember well the four of us going out to that pen around the chicken coop. (Not that there were hundreds of chickens, but there were plenty to make soup!)  I had a long strong wire with a hook at the end, snag a chicken, bring it over to the tree stump, Mom or Dad raising up that hatchet and...

...well, enough about that. Suffice to say, there'd be chicken, and chicken soup, for supper when the weather turned cold.

I was looking over the Country Living Magazine website, and they had a bunch of great chicken soup recipes, 23 of them in fact. Everything from Ginger Garlic Chicken Ramen to Pesto Chicken Minestrone, Chicken Meatball, and Vegetable Noodle to Chicken and Fideo Posole. And I'll bet they're all fantastic, all great. But there's one thing they're not.

Moms. And while none will be able to beat her memory, I'm all in for trying some of these recipes!

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.

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