Charmion, I think making yourself a batch of chicken soup will be a wonderful ceremony to start to reclaim the kitchen and your appetite. I made enough that it will last for a few days, and this is the soup that I started by putting all of the cut up but unpeeled vegetables in the Dutch oven in the oven and let them roast. Once the veggies had been in for a while I added a couple of chicken breasts with skin and bones into the pot in the oven and let the meat bake and the chicken fat add to the vegetable flavor.

Once the pot was back on the stovetop I took out the chicken and let it finish baking in the oven and in the pot added water and let it simmer for a while. before discarding all of the solid vegetables. I added the chicken bones and skin to the pot and it simmered a little more and the finished meat cooled and went into the fridge. I bottled the stock with all of the fat and waited a couple of days until I made the soup with a new batch of vegetables (onion, carrots, celery, potatoes sautéed in a little olive oil and several dollops of the retained chicken fat for flavor), a large cube of chicken bouillon (a good brand for the "value added" flavor) and at the end added the cubed chicken and the egg noodles.

It is one of my better batches. It wasn't like making soup from an entire bird carcass, but it came out just as strong.