What did you do over the weekend? Tell me. I’m bored over here… Please?
Me? Wanna know what I did? No? I’ll tell you anyway… I murdered two chickens and made noodles. What else was there to do?
Actually, there was plenty more do and then some. I also made a big batch of bean and ham soup, cleaned out the quail cage and spread the manure at the base of all the fruit trees, drooled over my fig plants, picked the first two TOMATOES of the season, dug up and laid onions out to dry, picked over a pound of blackberries and cleaned out my mud room. And there were a lot of pissed off spiders by the end of the mud room cleaning by the way… Then, I took a nap on the porch swing with a rooster in my lap. But that was on Sunday.
On Saturday it was raining enormous amounts all day long so there wasn’t any use in trying to get much done outside. Never one to sit idle for long, I decided to cull two older hens and make homemade noodles to go with them.
I didn’t really have a specific recipe in mind, but I had eggs and chickens and vegetables, so I did one of those “just wing it” kind of moves. I roasted the chicken and basted it about every fifteen minutes with the broth it put out. While the chicken was roasting I made the noodles and laid them out to dry.
Then I sautéed carrot, onion, mushroom, celery and garlic and finished cooking it all in the broth. When that was ready, I removed all the vegetables from the broth, set them aside temporarily and then cooked my noodles in the broth, which resulted in a nice, savory, mouth-watering gravy.
Once the noodles were ready I tossed the vegetables back into the gravy, along with the roasted chicken which I cut into large pieces. Next I removed the breast meat from the bones and tore it into large pieces, saving the bones for soup stock later. I added salt and pepper to taste. Once plated, I grated on a little fresh parmesan because, you know, parmesan. But it didn’t really need it. It was that good anyway. Do you want my easy noodle recipe? You should try it. You can find it HERE.
Mind you, this chicken dinner would have been equally good served with mashed potatoes or even rice or biscuits, buy I was in need of some major “noodle therapy” as I like to call it. You know – an artistic release of some sort. Stress relief to be blunt…
I love running the dough through the pasta machine, cranking it thinner each time I pass it though and then finally running it through the noodle cutter. It’s relaxing…
Making homemade noodles is like playing with Play-Doh, but only better, because you get to eat the end result. You could eat Play-Doh too, but it just won’t taste as good as homemade noodles. And let’s be real here, if people find out you’re eating that sort of thing they’ll try and have you committed. Avoid the asylum – don’t eat the Play-Doh. Instead, feed it to some rotten kid.
So, what did you do over the weekend? ~A