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Starting your chicken soup with a whole chicken provides 3 main benefits: its nutritious, cost effective, and extremely easy!
Boiling the Whole Chicken for Chicken Noodle Soup
Our recipe begins with boiling our whole chicken. This creates a beautiful broth that will be the foundation for our soup. I added herbs from my garden like parsley, thyme, oregano, and rosemary along with salt and pepper. The beauty of this recipe is that I can start this step when I'm in the kitchen fixing lunch and by the time supper rolls around, much of the work is done.
About 30 minutes before dinner, I'll pull the chicken and broth from the stockpot, saving the broth in a bowl to the side.
While the the chicken cools, I'll cut the veggies-I use a mix of carrots, sweet onions, and celery seasoned with salt and pepper and add them to the same pot on medium heat with a a pad of butter.
Vegetables for Chicken Noodle Soup Whole Chicken Recipe
As they cook, I'll begin the slightly less than pleasant task of removing all the bones, cartilage, and anything that looks unappetizing from the boiled chicken. When the vegetables have cooked down until they're nearly soft, I'll chop the garlic. The key to a simple recipe like this one is making full use of each ingredient. With the vegetables, we do this by cooking them until there's a lovely layer of brown on the bottom of the pot called fond. This brown goodness is what will lend beautiful flavor to the final soup. Once there's a bit of fond, I add the garlic.
As the garlic cooks on medium low with the veggies, I make a quick trip out the back door of our kitchen to the raised bed gardens to pinch a handful of parsley and thyme.
The sun was setting, so it was a beautiful night for cooking with fresh herbs. Coming back inside, I gave the thyme sprigs a rinse, pulled the leaves from the stem and chucked them into the pot with the veggies and garlic giving them a quick stir before deglazing the pan with the reserved chicken stock from earlier.
Now our bunch loves a flavorful stock, and although this certainly didn't come from the garden, the addition of some "better than bouillon" helps us enjoy all the nutrition this soup has to offer with the addition of some great flavor we love. I throw a heaping tablespoon of this gold paste into the broth and depending on how much broth is created from boiling the chicken, add a bit more water until the pot is nearly full. Adding this prior to the pasta allows the pasta to soak up all the flavor from the bouillon, the veggies, and the chicken broth as it cooks.
Finishing the Whole Chicken Noodle Soup Recipe
I bring this delicious concoction to a boil before adding in the pasta, I use the extra protein variety and let that cook for about 15 minutes before adding back in the shredded chicken and discarding the bones to our furry friend outside, who is still on the furry foe list in my book for digging in my front flower beds. I add some chopped flat leaf parsley to the pot at the end of cooking and stir into the soup.
If you feel fancy, you can sprinkle a bit on top of the bowl like I did here. However, if you aren't blogging with it, dig on in!
I served this soup with a bit of home-made whole wheat quick bread. I didn't take time to mess with sourdough and just threw a quick rising yeast bread in the oven for this meal and my little family loved it. After a day of working out in the cold. October rain, my husband was very happy with a bowl of warm, nourishing soup. My boys may have been just as pleased with a platter of soft butter and warm bread! Peek to see if you can tell which styled plate is moms ;)
We've been eating on this soup for a couple days now and I'm happy to report that it stores extremely well in the fridge. Consider adding a bit of water when warming it up in the microwave or on the stovetop.
I've also frozen this soup in the past with great success reheating it and it makes an excellent "make -ahead" meal.
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