Recipe: Chicken Noodle Soup

This may be slightly obvious, but I'm essentially using these posts as a way to remember recipes I threw together without writing much down at the time. Yay for taking advantage of the cloud in the cheapest way possible! :) Without further ado, here then is the chicken noodle soup that Simon and I both liked very much even though we both hate chicken noodle soup. I still don't know why I thought it was a good idea to try something we both hate, but it did make me feel a lot better about my cooking skills. Very (VERY) loosely based on this recipe here.

Miss Veronica's Totally-Awesome, One-Hour, Welcome-Home, Safe-For-Dental-Work, I-Just-Paid-The-Bills-So-Let's-See-What-We-Have-In-The-Cabinets Chicken Noodle Soup

Servings: 4-6
Cooking time: about an hour

Ingredients
3 frozen chicken breasts
1 can chicken broth
water
beef bouillon concentrate
dried parsley flakes
dried thyme
1 bay leaf
~2 cups dry rotini noodles
1 can sliced carrots
garlic salt
pepper

Instructions


Thaw out the chicken. If you got Simon or his roommate to stick it in the fridge this morning, great. If not, dump the frozen chicken breasts in a pot of water, turn the heat on about 3 or 4, and let that sit for 15 minutes or so until they thaw.

Pull out the pieces of chicken and cut them into smallish pieces. Dump out the water, scrub all the fat off the bottom of the pot, and put the pot back on the stove with the chicken and the broth. Add water to cover the chicken by an inch or so and put in about half a teaspoon of beef bouillon concentrate. Just make it smell good. Also put in parsley and thyme until it smells even better and drop in a bay leaf. Put all the spices away, scrub the cutting board with antibacterial dish soap, and turn up the heat until the broth boils. Skim off all the foam, turn it back down to a simmer, and sit back and study Systems Architecture for 15 or 20 minutes until the biggest piece of chicken is done all the way through.

Pull the chicken back out and stick it on a plate under a paper towel to cool down. Put noodles in the pot until it looks about right compared to the amount of chicken on the plate. Congratulate yourself on finding a use for that can of carrots Simon's mother gave you, drain it, and add the carrots along with more water and bouillon concentrate and some garlic salt. Simmer until the noodles are done, probably about another 10 minutes. Meanwhile, pull the cooled chicken pieces into shreds until they look like a size that would be good in soup. Put them back in when the noodles are cooked and leave the soup on the stove until it's all back to a comfortable temperature. Remove the bay leaf to avoid a repeat of the Thai chicken curry incident, add pepper to taste, and serve hot.