Cold-Weather Chicken Soup

Since the weather forecast around here is for snow, and temperatures down to -9 F (-22 C), I thought a recipe or two for some cold-weather food might be appropriate. Here's a chicken soup recipe adapted from Craig Claiborne that I've been making for twenty years now - that is, it's pretty reliable.

1 chicken (in the 3-to-4 pound or 1.5 kilo range)
Corn (fresh or frozen), about 2 cups or 500 mL volume (or more to taste)
Egg noodles (4 oz. / 0.15 kg or more, depending on taste)
Two hard-boiled eggs
Fresh parsley

Take the chicken, cover it in water, add a teaspoon of salt (6g) and some ground pepper, bring to a boil, then turn the heat down to a simmer. Cook it this way until the meat begins to come off the bone a bit - that will take at least an hour, perhaps closer to 90 minutes. Take the chicken out of the broth and let it cool enough to shred the meat off by hand.

Skim some of the fat from the broth - depending on the chicken you started with, there will probably be more of that than you want. (If you have lots of time, such as making this soup for the next day, you can chill the whole thing and remove the fat that way). Either way, get things back to a low simmer and add the corn at this point - if you're using frozen corn kernels, give the soup about five or ten minutes to heat back up. Then add the egg noodles - the quantities of both of these can be adjusted to how thick you'd like the soup to be, but the amounts given are a good starting point. Simmer for 8 or 10 mi...

Source: In the Pipeline - December 31, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Blog Housekeeping Source Type: blogs