Chicken Noodle Soup From Scratch

Hello readers,

Let me introduce myself. My name is Gina, I'm a nurse living in Portland, OR. I love to cook and bake in my free time. I mainly cook comfort foods and crock-pot dishes since it makes a week of lunches so easy! As for baking- it's mostly cookies. I love all baked goods, the "sweet-fats" but there's something about sinking your tooth into a cookie and getting that instant sugar rush that I love! My guiding motto for cooking is "work with what you got." No specialty ingredients, no special cook/bakeware.

Today, I bring you chicken noodle soup. My recipe is adapted from a local food blog I adore (http://bread-and-honey.blogspot.com/2008/07/chicken-stock-finally.html) and from my go-to cooking reference http://www.allrecipes.com/ (sorry, Martha, Rachel, and Julia.) This "recipe" is a guide. You can really add or omit whatever you want, however I don't know what you'd do if you're a vegetarian. This is a chicken-heavy soup. For this recipe there's a set of vegetables that will give all their nutrients to the stock and will become soggy and gross, and a second set of vegetables you add later that will be a little crisper and still have their nutrients. I guess this is why people eat it when they're sick- twice the "good stuff." The amount of veggies you add depends on how much you like eating them.

Ingredients:

• 1 "young chicken"


• 1 lg onion, peeled and quartered


• 3-4 lg carrots- 1-2 for the stock, 2-3 for the soup


• 1 bunch celery- 2/3 bunch for the stock, 1/3 chopped up for the soup, reserve the leaves for later


• water- enough to fill pot


• 3 bay leaves


• salt and pepper- freshly grind it, enough for your tastes


• poultry seasoning- to taste


• 1- 8 oz package dry egg noodles (Ronzoni Healthy Harvest was on sale... thus I am using it)


• 1/4 c chicken bouillon powder (I'm not using this, but you might want to)


• 8 oz sliced mushrooms

1.) Attack the chicken. I'm sure that there's a French, methodical way to do this but here's what I did: Slice down the chicken's chest, remove all the skin and fat that you can, and remove chicken breasts and freeze for later. Loosen up all the joints by freeing up skin and tendons then dislocate them all! Then cut the limb off and take the skin off, throw it in the pot. When the giblets fall out of your massacred chicken, throw them out. Rinse out the "cavity" just in case some digestive juices are left over. Put the cavity in the pot.

2.) Making stock: put chicken parts, onion, celery, carrots (I chopped the celery and carrots into big pieces) in a large stock pot and add enough water to cover everything and nearly fill up the pot. Bring to a boil, skim off the fat, add the bay leaves, then lower to a simmer for 4 hours. Strain the stock, throw out the dilapidated veggies and dig through all the meat- throwing out the cartilage, bones, skin and fat (unless you're into that)

3.) Now you have the stock and chicken bits. Add the poultry seasoning, fresh chopped carrots, mushrooms and celery, bring to a boil, add the egg noodles then lower to a simmer for 10-20 minutes (depending on how soft you want the noodles to be). Salt and pepper to taste. Mine didn't turn out as savory as I had hoped, so definitely try the bouillon. Otherwise, pretty delicious! Serve with multigrain crackers.