What to do when PDX gets its 1st snow of the year and closes everything down?

You make home-made chicken noodle soup of course. Duh!

Just about ready to eat!

Over the holiday, my wife found herself with a new Pressure Cooker. I know it is a little self serving to get your spouse something to cook with, especially when you like to eat like I do, but hey, what’s a guy supposed to do. My wife loves to cook…and I love to eat. It works out well that way.

A couple nights prior to this picture being taken, we cooked a whole chicken in the new appliance. Needless to say it was delicious. Going into that meal we knew we were going to be making stock with all the left over chicken-bits, like you do when you have a just cooked a whole chicken and denuded it.

So with the left over chicken and newly made broth, we broke out the flour and eggs and made the noodles. This was out first attempt and as you can see, the noodles are a little long and a little fat. This was our first attempt and honestly, aesthetics take a back seat to taste. And believe me when I tell you this – this meal was fantastic!

So we roll the noodles a little thinner next time and we cut them shorter for ease of placing them neatly in our maws. But overall – this was a fantastic idea. It allowed my wife and I to make something from scratch together from ingredients we already had lying around the house. Aside from the fun we had making them together, we also got to determine what went into this meal. This was about it:

Broth was made with the following:

• chicken carcass
• water
• celery
• onions
• salt
• pepper
• Better than Bullion chicken stock (I think)

Strain everything out and have pure flavor.

Noodles were made with the following:

• flour
• eggs
• salt (maybe – I forget)

Roll dough out and cut into strips (we will make them thinner and shorter next time)

Soup was made with the following:

• Bring broth to a light boil or simmer and add chicken, carrots, celery and parsley (we used curly as we couldn’t find Italian)
• Add noodles one at a time so they don’t stick to one another. We stirred the broth as we did this so the noodles were fully immersed and were cooked on all sides.
• Once all ingredients were together we let the whole thing cook another 5-10 minutes (maybe) until the noodles were fully cooked. Smaller noodles will take less time to cook.

The whole dish was constructed by adding the left-over chicken (cut into bite-size chunks) from the chicken we pressure cooked a few days earlier to the broth (that was simmering) we had made followed up by the noodles we also just made. The all-in time was probably less than an hour.

It doesn’t get much better than this!

Peace be with you!

More to come…

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