homestyle chicken noodles

I was anxious to make home made noodles since Jack's mom taught me how over Thanksgiving. So when I had an open afternoon, I went for it.

I started by roasting a chicken in my usual fashion. It was accompanied in the roasting pan with cloves of garlic, shallots and an onion.


After I took that out of the oven to rest, I started on my noodles. I used 1 cup of flour, 2 eggs, 1 teaspoon baking powder and some salt and a splash of milk. As I mixed, I saw that it was too sticky, and I probably ended up adding another 1/2 cup of flour. Knead the dough for about 5 minutes, then roll it out and cut it into strips. Boom. Noodles. I dusted these pretty heavily with flour, then let them sit while I dismantled the chicken.




I took most all of the meat off the chicken. That was ugly, as I am still awful at cutting up chicken. It didn't matter much for this, as I just needed all sorts of chicken pieces. Once mutilated, I covered the bones, skin, cartilage, junk , etc. with some water and made it into a rough stock. I let it simmer, which I knw is kinda a sin in stock making, but I was doing what Jack's mom did, darn it. And her's turned out yummy...





As for the veggies that roasted with the chicken, I pureed them all together to make a sort of spread, which also served as a dip for my brussel sprouts. Mmmmmm....


I acutally did all this last evening, then put everything separately in the fridge and made the meal tonight. So after a pretty hectic day at work, all i had to do was roast some brussel sprouts ( a bag of frozen sprouts with butter, salt and pepper and some garlic cloves), heat up the stock, add some water and boil the noodles (and all the flour they are dusted with...this is important because it thickens the sauce) in the stock.

After the noodles cooked for about 12-15 minutes (this time may be shorter for fresh fresh noodles, but mine sat in the fridge overnight), I added a couple handfuls of pulled chicken, and continues to cook everything at a boil for like 15 minutes or so, until the noodles were tender.



So that was dinner. Roasted brussel sprouts, roasted shallot/onion/garlic puree to dip the sprouts in, and chicken and noodles from scratch. Pretty simple, but oh so nice and warm and comforting. The smells in the apartment are awesome. Like Nonna's house the day after Christmas. Or Jack's family's house the day after Thanksgiving...



And with that, I accomplished my post per day in November for NaBloPoMo! Woo! That wasn't so bad, was it. Oh wait, that means tomorrow is December!! Wah! I'm not ready!!! :)

onion soup-er

So, the whole reason I made beef stock (besides needing the practice), was so that Jack could make some French onion soup.

He started with about 5 pounds of onions, both red and yellow. 5 POUNDS!! There were lots of tears shed by both of us. More by me, probably because I have the wimpiest eyeballs ever, and even though I stayed out of the kitchen while he cut the onions up, I still got verklempt.



The onions took forever to caramelize. Not forever, but, what, like an hour? Once they were just translucent, he took half of the onions out, and caramelized the other half. Then he added the rest back in and continued caramelizing everything. This gave a nice variance in the onions' textures. Some of the onions melt in your mouth and some still have a little bite to them.



Once they were nice and brown and sweet, he added a bottle of beer and my beef stock, some herbs (dried thyme (2 tsp.) and dried basil (2 tsp.) crumbled and ground with hands) and some salt and pepper.



And from there, it was just a matter of heating everything through.



For the whole crouton/cheese aspect, we sliced up a baguette, topped it with slices of aged provolone, broiled it until the cheese was bubbly and the edges of the crust were brown, and dropped 'em on top of the soup! Voila! Bon Appetit!



So my stock, although weaker than I would've liked, worked out well for this, because it let the flavor of the onions shine through, while still lending some nice savory warmth and a nice touch of richness.

There is a nice thorough article here about the layers of French onion soup, and some of the secrets and tips. And here's the Onion soup recipe from Tony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook. He uses bacon!

All in all, the soup is not exactly hard to make. It takes time, and some patience, but is not complicated. Simple yet so very very satisfying. And better the next day!

taking stock of the situation

Yesterday I made my first attempt at beef stock. Let me tell you up front, it wasn't a total success. But, here's what I did...

Got some beef...specifically some beef marrow bones and a couple beef soup bones. They all had quite a bit of meat on them. In total it was about 6 lbs. of beef all together.


Roasted the beef.


Covered the beef with water in a stock pot, brought everything near a simmer, then put the pot in the oven and kept the stock at a constant temp between 180-190F.


After 4 hours, I added some lightly roasted vegetables...specifically 4 carrots, 2 celery stalks, 1 yellow onion, 2 shallots and 4 cloves of garlic. i also added a small handful of whole black peppercorns. I brought all this back up to a simmer, then put it back in the oven for another hour.



I strained the stock once through just a strainer, then again through some cheese cloth.



Here is the final result.


It was really quite clear. However, the flavor was pretty weak. I used way too much water, and probably could have used more bones to make it richer. While I was dancing my feets off at my reunion, Jack stayed home and boiled the heck out of the stock until it reduced by nearly half! That improved the flavor big time.


So, like I said, not the results I'd hoped for, but I'll chalk it up as an important learning experience. I see the value of making your own stock for sure (Ruhlman kept telling us in his class that he would rather us use water than canned broth), but it is something you need to work at.