How I Made Chicken Noodle Soup and How The Weather Won

What does a home chef do with a yummy chicken carcass? Make some soup of course! Or at least try..

Monday didn't started off well, my chicken was accepted to Foodgawker and I was going to bake some bread and cook chicken soup for dinner! I got home and checked my dough that had been rising for the last 18 hours, hoping that it would look ok. And it did. I poured it out onto my floured counter and it dripped out like wet batter. WHAT. It seems as though the flour at the bottom of my Food City brand flour were basically little rocks of flour, so that 3 cups of flour I used was basically two cups of dissolved flour and a cup of white rocks, and not the good kind (just kidding(!)).

With the bread out of the picture, I sat in the corner of my apartment with the lights off in silent, teary-eyed contemplation. Then it hit me, I have a whole chicken to boil! Sick. I stuck the chicken in a giant pot, threw in a chopped celery stalk and carrot, and filled it with water and let it boil. A couple of hours later I had chicken stock. While wasting time playing with my new camera, Olivia and I completely disregarded any signs of impending doom in the form of rain and thunder. I had my mise en place set up, chicken shredded, and herbs ready. I drained the bones and other parts and started my soup. I threw in my carrots, celery, and onion into the stock and then it happened. Rain started pouring from the sky as if God shoved his thumb up a water hose. Thunder and lightning started striking literally yards from my apartment and I'm pretty sure was right down the street. Then it really happened, the power went out. Damnit. I had a whole pot of soup on the stove with raw vegetables in it and the meat hadn't even been added yet! I was definitely not about to eat it, so I thought on my feet and made dinner with what we had left in the pantry. While not as satisfying, it hit the spot.

I had no other choice but to abandon the soup for the night and eat somewhere else. On a night where I'm cooking something, the last thing I want is to have to eat someone else's food. I want my own cooking! So the next day, after the power was on, I set out to finish it. By now it had become something else, it had been 24 hours since I started cooking it and I wanted it done, it was more than a dish, it was a task. I got everything back to a boil, added my chicken, threw everything that needed to be in there INCLUDING a box of noodles. Not the best idea I've ever had considering the pasta soaked up basically all of my stock...but whatever. I added a corn starch slurry to the soup in an effort to change it from chicken noodle soup to chicken and noodles, and it kind of worked. What I was left with was a bowl of chicken noodle soup without much of the soup part, it was still delicious though.