A "Home Cooked" meal

We had home made Chicken soup today, the stock has been simmering for the last 2 days:

This stock has:

approximately the bones of 4 chickens

1 whole chicken

3 large field carrots

1 very large white onion

1/2 a head of garlic

basil

fresh rosemary (about 4 inches)

curry powder

1 whole dried hot pepper

about a dozen pepper corns

Now this was started at about 5pm Sunday night only thing I did with the onion was chop it into quarters. Left the skin on it and just cut the carrots into thirds, did not peel them. I strained it completely at about 2pm today and after running it through 2 strainers and pulling apart the meat from the whole chicken and putting it back the above picture is what we had.

I then added about a cup of wheat berries and put it on simmer and covered it till I was ready for our evening meal. Right at about 5 pm I diced a medium onion not too finely and added it. Then I made some egg noodles.

These are the noodles as I made them, ingredients:

2 cups of flour

2 eggs

salt

garlic powder

about (give or take) 1 cup of water

It's very simple from there, mix all dry ingredients together, then make a "well" in the center and crack your eggs into it. Start mixing the eggs in, then slowly add water and maybe flour till you get the consistency your want. Which is about equal to biscuit dough.

Then form it into a ball and cut off small portions to roll out. I have a rolling pin, but I never use it folks. I generally just use my hands. Then you cut them into strips, how thin should they be? I don't measure it so I really can't say... but not above 1/2 an inch I'd say.

Also you should note that while you are making your noodles if you are planning to cook them separate from your broth start your water when you start your noodles. Once the water is boiling drop them in wait a couple minutes and give them a gentle stir just in case they stuck to the bottom. Then let them float on the surface a while then you can take them out and they are ready.

Here is my finished product:

Doesn't it look good? Oh, the carrots I used to make the stock went to my chickens, and they were very happy about it. I was going to add some cut up carrot at the end and forgot. You can always "finish" this soup differently than I have, as I work with what I've got.

By the way, we save all chicken bones when we cook chicken just for stock making, when I have a ton of bones me or Silver or both of us makes a chicken stock and it gets "finished" based on what we have. A handy bit of info here, we also keep some whole carrots frozen just to make sure we have them for soup stocks. As my kids go through carrots like you would not believe. I also prefer field carrots for stock making as they have a stronger flavor than "cello" bag ones do. Though if I ever get some carrots growing here you know I'll be keeping some just for my soup making!

Be Well and Blessed Be...