New Year Begins With a Massive Cleanup and Chicken and Milk Soup Recipe

The period over the holidays was quite productive as I took advantage of it to get some things done that I don't normally have time for:

1. I was able to go to my E-bay store and explore all the marketing features and tools available to me. As a result, I was able in one evening to give my store a complete overhaul. My blog links are now on all my store pages and all of my product categories for British West Africa have been created. 

2. I was able to send e-mails to all of the stamp clubs in Canada that are listed in the Royal Philatelic Society's directory - 69 in all, introducing my blog. To date the response has not been bad - 6 people have gotten back to me, one club has placed a link to my blog on their web page and another has extended an invitation for me to come and speak at one of their meetings. 

3. I came up with a schedule of topics to post to my Canadian blog of over 30 posts which I expect will take well into March. This is great as I now have a goal to meet in terms of topic coverage, where before it was all purely open-ended. 

So with my plan in hand, I started this week with the task initially of gathering together all the material I would be working on over the next two months:

The 1903-1911 King Edward VII Issue

The 1908 Quebec Tercentenary Issue

The 1911-1928 Admiral Issue

Gathering this material together took the better part of a day and much to my delight, it filled 1.5 large red #102 card boxes, so about 1,500 items I estimate. That's a pretty good concentration of this scarce and desirable early material. I'm looking forward to listing it finally. 

However, I was encouraged to continue organizing my stock as I also had to get material organized so that I could give Fabio something to do next week when he starts with me. So I decided to organize all of my pre 1952 material and got to work Monday night and all day yesterday. I got it all done and filled another 7 red boxes about 3/4 full. So I reckon that all told I've got about 7,000 items from the period to 1952 to list. It was a good exercise because I can see where the gaps are in my stock and there aren't many in the basic material. I do desperately need early plate blocks and postal history, but in terms of basic stamps I'm in pretty good shape.  It was really satisfying and confidence inspiring to see so much desirable material at once and made me feel again that I will meet my sales goal over the next few months. 

I had an opportunity to make another simple yet delicious soup on Monday night, which I will now share with you: Chicken and Milk Soup. 

You will need for 6 servings:

1 large onion, finely chopped

1 chicken breasts finely diced

2-3 teaspoons of salt and pepper mixture

1 can of creamed corn

1 small can of whole corn

6 cups of milk

1 cup of half and half cream

2 tablespoons of cornstarch

1/2 cup of water

1/3 cup butter

Melt the butter in a large soup pot over medium heat and saute the onion and chicken until the onion is soft and the chicken is white. Season generously with the salt and pepper mixture. 

Then add in the corn, creamed corn, milk, and cream. Simmer over low heat for 40 minutes, partially covered to allow it to reduce by about one-third. 

After 40 minutes, make a slurry from the water and cornstarch and add it to the soup and stir to partially thicken. Check the seasonings and adjust if necessary and serve hot with bread, crackers or buns.