Chicken Noodle Soup · Make Food Go Further

There are days when we need Chicken Noodle Soup to just soothe the soul. It could be for those rainy, cold days or those days when you feel miserable and want some comfort food – or it could be one of those Sunday night “I can’t be bothered cooking” kind of meals. Either way, Chicken Noodle Soup is an easy meal – serve it up with some hot crusty bread and a touch of parmesan cheese – ahhhhh – bliss!

This recipe is part of our “1 Chicken – 4 meals – 3 People” series

Ingredients

1 whole large raw chicken carcass- breasts, thighs, legs and wings removed
half a bunch of celery
4 carrots
3 onions
4 cloves garlic
angel hair noodles/pasta
salt and pepper to taste

Method

Grab a large saucepan. Chop up 1 onion, 2 carrots, and about half of the celery (including the head). You don’t need to dice these, you can just cut in half and put into the saucepan – we are making stock at this stage, so all the solid things will be tossed later. Add the chicken carcass, skin, salt, pepper, garlic and any other herbs you have handy which would be ok for the stock. Add water to cover the carcass. Put on the stove on medium to low heat, put the lid on and let it cook for about 2-3 hours – the longer the better – keep the lid on to reduce loss of liquids.

Back to the stock – by now (about 2-3 hour later) the smell of the stock will be pretty pungent – take a peek at it – if you get strong wafts of flavour, its ready. Take it off the heat. Using tongs and a strainer, grab the vegetables and the carcass from the stock mix, put the carcass on a plate (you are going to pick off the scraps of meat). Toss the carrots, celery and onions (or set aside to make another batch of stock). Strip the carcass of any spare meat and strain off the stock from the pot to catch any small bones or left over vegetables.

Return the stock to the saucepan, finely chop up the rest of the raw carrots, celery and onion. Add the spare cooked meat, raw vegetables, and crush up the angel hair pasta – add all of these to the pot and bring to the boil. Cook until the pasta is tender. You may need to add more salt and pepper at this stage – also add any other vegetables you like at this stage. Once its cooked, remove from heat and cool. Soup is ready!

Note – if you wanted to take the last of the vegetables and carcass one step further, you could make another lot of chicken stock from these ingredients before throwing them away. You may need to add more vegetables to get the flavours up. Stock is great to keep in the freezer for other dishes, and since you have made it from scratch it is so much yummier than powdered stock or pre-made – cheaper too!). You can use this stock to make more soup, risotto, sauces, casseroles, curries, etc.

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This post was posted in Chicken, Soup