Homemade Chicken and Noodles

There’s nothing like Chicken and Noodle soup to comfort away winter’s ailments! This recipe is extremely comforting, and delicious! My sister-in-law, a great cook, fixed this for us over New Year’s. I memorized her chicken recipe and made it for us within the same week! The homemade noodle recipe comes from my tattered Better Homes and Garden’s “New Cook Book”. It’s far from new, but ’tis the name anyhow.

Homemade Chicken and Noodles

• 1 whole chicken, cut in pieces
• 1-2 cans chicken broth (recipe calls for 1, I use 2)
• 1 can cream of celery soup
• homemade noodles

Cook chicken pieces and broth in slow cooker/crockpot for five hours on high, or till meat falls off bones. Save broth, transfer broth only to soup kettle. Add homemade egg noodles to boiling broth, turn down heat and cook noodles (about ten-fifteen minutes). Meanwhile, remove chicken meat from bones, discard fat, skin and bones. Shred chicken into pieces with fingers–should crumble apart. When noodles are done cooking, add chicken and one can cream of celery soup. If you prefer to thicken the soup, sprinkle a little flour across top and blend it in.

~ Note ~

Please, if you want this recipe to be the very best, use the whole chicken (cut up), or at least chicken pieces on the bone. Substituting boneless skinless chicken breasts just doesn’t produce the same tenderness and flavor. Don’t forget about the low-fat cream soup substitute recipe I shared yesterday, it’s a good one for this recipe, and if you do use it, just dice your celery and add it to the broth in the slow cooker at the beginning of the five hours, it will be nice and tender and a part of your broth without having to add it to the cream soup mix.

Also, my mom sent over five peanut butter jars of frozen homemade chicken broth, complete with bits of onion and celery…so I substituted two of those for the cans of chicken broth. Can you say brilliant? (Thanks, Mom!) Anytime you make a turkey or chicken, save the bones/carcass, etc and cover them with water–add minced garlic, diced onions and celery and simmer for a couple of hours. You’ll have a healthy broth to keep in your freezer for sick days…or whatever.

Okay, on to the best part, the homemade noodles.

Homemade Noodles

I make mine with half whole wheat flour (home ground), we love them. If you prefer sticking with white flour, that works great too. This batch will be the equivalent to an eight ounce package of store-bought, depending on how thin you roll it out. I use my mom’s pasta machine, which makes a hard job amazingly easy. I’ve rolled it out by hand also, it’s quite the workout, but they turn out just as delicious. The main thing with rolling them out by hand, is to get them thin enough.

• 2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour or whole wheat flour, or a mix of the two
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 beaten eggs
• 1/3 cup water
• 1 tsp cooking oil or olive oil

In a large mixing bowl, stir together 2 cups of the flour and the salt. (At this point, if you want to add herbs to the dry mixture, such as 1 tsp dried crushed basil, marjoram, or sage, go ahead. I don’t usually do this) Make a well in the center of the mixture. In a bowl combine eggs, water, and oil. Add to flour mixture; mix well.

Sprinkle kneading surface with the remaining flour (or use your dough hook in mixer). Turn dough out onto floured surface. Knead till dough is smooth and elastic (8-10 minutes total). Cover and let rest for 10 minutes.

Divide dough into fourths. On a lightly floured surface, roll each fourth into a 12×12 inch square (about 1/16 inch thick). Let stand 20 minutes. Cut as desired. Roll dough up into a long cylinder, and slice noodles about 1/4 inches wide, unroll.

Or, if using pasta machine, pass dough through machine according to manufacturer’s instructions till 1/16 inch thick. Cut as desired.

Cook pasta, allowing a few more minutes for dried or frozen pasta. Makes 1 pound fresh pasta.

~Note~ I made mine earlier in the day and just let the noodles dry on my counters and cooling racks. I didn’t end up using all of the noodles for our family meal, so I stored the remainder (dry noodles) in airtight Zip lock in the refrigerator. For freezing, my cookbook says to dry the pasta for at least an hour, seal it in a freezer bag or freezer container and freeze for up to 8 months. (This is making me want to mega-cook a whole bunch of pasta, anyone else?)

Now, of course, you could just buy those yummy frozen egg noodles at the grocery store and save yourself this delightful from-scratch experience, but even those don’t compare. If you can, borrow a pasta machine from someone and show your children how to make noodles. Mine had a blast. Of course, 7 year old was sick on the couch, which was why I was making chicken and noodles in the first place…but my 10 and 3 year olds said it was way more fun than play-dough!

Alas, my 7 yo passed on eating anything with us that night. When she finally regained a semblance of an appetite the next evening, guess what she wanted to eat? Romaine lettuce and banana bread. So we made sure she had some of both! Her loss, because that soup was incredible!