The Short Version of My Chicken Noodle Soup.

This is what I call my ‘short cut’ to chicken noodle soup. My long version of this recipe involves me roasting a whole chicken for an hour, boiling it with vegetables, straining it, and then letting the broth cool and sit in the refrigerator overnight so I can skim the fat off of it. If you don’t have 5 hours of cooking time to kill, plus the patience to wait for the broth to cool, then I recommend just making this version of the soup. It’s just as good, and takes maybe 2 hours total.

Ingredients

2 chicken breasts (with bone in)

3 carrots

3-4 celery stalks

1 onion

1 clove of garlic

3 32oz containers of Chicken stock

Medium egg noodles

Salt

Pepper

Celery salt (or celery seed)

Poultry seasoning

Olive oil

(Optional items)

1 bay leaf

Chicken Bouillon

Steps

Chop your carrots, celery, and onion into even pieces. I tend to dice the onions smaller since I don’t want large onion chunks in my soup. If you like that sort of thing, dice them how you feel. For the garlic, use a garlic crusher.

Add a tablespoon of olive oil to the bottom of the pot you will be making your soup in. As the oil begins to heat up, add in your chopped vegetables with a little salt and pepper. Stir until the onions are translucent. Once your onions are translucent, add in a little poultry seasoning and a little of the celery salt. You can forgo the normal salt if you are worried it will have too much salt added – just using celery salt is fine – go easy on it if you’re worried about salt content. Celery seed is an acceptable substitute if you wish to forgo salt altogether.

Once you have mixed in some of the seasoning with your vegetables, pour in two of the three containers of chicken stock and keep heat low. If you are adding a bay leaf, this is when you'd add it.

Remove the skin and what fat you can from the two chicken breasts and then add them to the chicken stock. Cover and let cook for one hour.

After one hour, remove the chicken breasts from the stock and, with two forks, pull off the cooked chicken meat into a bowl. Place the bones back into the stock and let them cook while the meat cools until you can touch it.

In a separate pot, cook your pasta. I usually cook 2 to 3 handfuls of pasta for a large pot like this. I do not salt the water for this kind of pasta.

Once the pasta has cooked, I strain the pasta and run cold water over the noodles until they are cold to the touch.

The chicken breast meat is usually cool enough to handle once the pasta is finished, so you can then tear the meat into bite sized pieces.

Remove the bones (and the bay leaf if added) from the stock. Add in your chicken breast meat and season to taste. You may need to add more celery salt, pepper, or a touch of cayenne pepper if you like. If you want, add in one tea spoon of the bouillon I use – I only add this if the broth tastes watery. I rarely need to use it with this recipe.

Add in pasta. The last box of broth is added if the soup is too thick – I tend to end up adding the third box of chicken stock after adding the pasta because I like a lot of broth with my soup.