With the cold, blustery winds and chilly temperatures, chicken noodle soup sounds good for supper.
If you buy your own noodles, don’t. Making homemade noodles is super easy. The bite and taste of a homemade noodle will make premade noodles taste like cardboard forever after.
Here are step-by-step instructions for easy, homemade noodles. This is my great grandma Emma’s recipe. I usually double or triple the recipe if serving a crowd.
Start with 1 cup of flour. Mix in 1/2 teaspoon salt.
You are done mixing the dry ingredients. (I told you this was easy.)
Mix together 1/4 cup of milk and one beaten egg.
(Back in the day, Grandma Emma must have had bigger chickens and bigger eggs. Her original recipe calls for 1 egg and 2 TBS milk.)
Add the milk/egg mixture to the dry ingredients. Mix together.
Flour the counter liberally. And your dough and flour.
Knead a few times to ensure all the ingredients are evenly mixed together. Be sure to flour your hands, too. Or the sticky dough will stick to your fingers.
Flour the counter again and flatten the dough. Flour the top. Now get out your rolling pin.
My 3 year old helper is getting the noodles nice and flat. Keep rolling and flouring until your dough is very thin.
I have found the easiest way to cut noodles is using a pizza cutter.
Add your noodles to a bubbling liquid. If you don’t have a liquidy soup, you can boil a pan of salted water.
I make my own chicken broth by putting a whole chicken in a pot of water (cover the chicken), add 1 TBS salt, diced celery, diced onion, and sliced carrots. Let cook on low for a couple hours. Take the chicken out to cool. Remove the meat from the chicken and add it back into the pot.
Bring to a rolling boil (not a sissy bubble here and there, but a REAL boil)!
Add the noodles slowly to the pan. If you add the noodles all at once, they will clump together and you will have a noodle blob.
I usually add 10 noodles, stir, get the pot boiling again, add more noodles, and repeat.
Boil for another 10 minutes or until the noodles are cooked through.
DUMPLINGS: If you want to skip the rolling part, increase the milk enough to make a sticky dough (probably 1/3 cup of milk). Drop by teaspoons into the boiling soup. Done. Dumplings are easier than noodles, but do take more time to cook.
Warm soup on a cold day… perfect!
