I am a big soup fan, especially when it is nice and cold outside and you want something cooking all day filling your home with good smells. One of my top choices is chicken and noodle, plain and simple straight up. This is my recipe…

Ingredients

Bone in chicken (I get a whole chicken cut in half, or you can use bone-in chicken breast and a thigh or two)

3 cans of chicken broth

black pepper

1/2 tsp onion powder

1/2 tsp. garlic powder

1 tsp thyme

three celery stalks

1 small yellow onion

4 carrots (I don’t typically use baby carrots but you can use a couple handfuls if you prefer)

½ stick butter

3-5 cups of water (I’ll explain)

chicken soup base (if you don’t know what that is, refer back to my post about some of my favorite things spices edition)

egg noodles (I make mine, I have a homemade noodle recipe if you want to make yours too)

First get out a medium-sized crockpot, pour a can of chicken broth in and cut up your celery and dice your onions and add a few handfuls them (save a little for later about a half a cup), next add the chicken over the top of that. Sprinkle a few pinches of black pepper on to your chicken and a few pinches of garlic powder, onion powder, and all of your thyme. Pour another can of broth in, if it can’t hold the full amount then set it aside for later, cook on low for 6 hours.

Once your chicken is cooked get out a soup pot, remove your chicken and set aside, I then get a strainer and pour my broth through into a bowl.  I do this because sometimes you can lose some small bones off of your chicken while it cooks in the crockpot. Add your butter to the bottom of your soup pot with a little fresh cut celery and onion and cook until they are tender. If you see and bones in the celery and onions you strained out remove them then add your onion and celery to the soup pot. Add the rest of your broth, depending on how big your pot is you are going to want to add some water as well otherwise you won’t have too much soup. At this point add about a tbsp. of your soup base and the rest of your onion and garlic powder, then cut up your carrots and add them to the pot. Your carrots will take a little while to cook so while you are waiting for them to get tender cut your chicken into chunks.

Once you can easily stab your carrots add in your noodles, note you are going to want your soup at a boil. Cook until noodles are cooked through. Don’t stir too much, it will make you feel like your noodles are just turning into a paste and if you mess with them too much they will just let them be to do their thing. It only takes about 5-10 minutes for them to be cooked all the way. Once they are cooked add in your chicken and simmer for at least 5 minutes. Give it a taste and see if you need to add any more soup base or pepper, be careful with that soup base though it is salty.

ENJOY!

REMEMBER TO TASTE AS YOU MAKE!