Chicken Noodle Soup and Home made Stock

I had a craving for some old fashioned home made chicken noodle soup the way my mother made it. She would bake a chicken and use the dripping with canned chicken stock and add root veggies and celery salt. Cook up some yolk free egg noodles and we have our selves a winner.

I decided to alter the recipe by making the chicken broth from scratch. I had so much success with vegetable and beef stocks I figured chicken couldnt be much harder. Turns out it was easier than either as the directions say to only boil everything for 2 hours and there doesnt seem to be a lot of fat at the surface to skim.

After I baked my chicken I put the carcass in with two quartered yellow or brown onions (dont peel ! the outside peel deepens the broth color), some celery (tops are okay), carrots (also dont peel), some flat Italian parsley (half the bunch cause I love parsley flavor) and then a bay leaf, a few whole pepper corns, some dried mushrooms and two quartered Roma tomatoes. The last two aren't typical stock ingredients but I find it will richen the flavor. My book tells me to only cook the stock 2 hours max. I was surprised at how dark it was after two hours so I figured I'd follow the directions and stop there. I froze most of it for later uses. So far I have to say it looks richer than my other stocks so much so that I added water to it when I made the soup. It is also the tastiest !

For the soup I sautéed some sliced thin onions and then a few bulk pieces of carrots and celery along with a few thin slices of turnip. Well I hope it was turnip cause it was labeled rutabaga at the store but somebody told me they are pretty much the same thing. It did kind look like turnips but with a slightly different color than I remember. After the onions were soft enough I added generous amounts of celery salt. The homemade stock is very much unsalty so you will almost always have to add salt to a soup made with your own stock. I prefer to be in charge of how much salt I add anyway. The stock went in next with some water and after adding some pepper and letting it simmer I added the large chunks of the cooked chicken.

In a separate pot I boiled the noodles and drained then when done. Yolk free egg noodles cook up pretty quick so its good to keep an eye on them. After the noodles were done I put some in a bowl and ladled the soup on top. I also store the noodles in a different container as they can get mushy/ break apart if actually left in the soup. The nice thing is as you reheat the broth it cooks down more making it more yummy. The noodles can be put in a bowl cold and they will warm up once the hot broth is ladled on.