Sunday Morning Soup

For some reason, I didn't sleep well and woke up at 4:30 this morning with the itch to do something productive. So, I started a batch of my famous (!!!) homemade chicken noodle soup, which always begins with a golden mirepoix. (A mirepoix is a blend of mixed finely diced vegetables, typically carrot, onion, and celery, lightly fried and used as a seasoning in stews, soups, and sauces, or on which to lay meat for roasting or braising.) First, I cut up the vegetables, added a splash of olive oil, and sauteed them until they changed from translucent to light golden in color with a few darker bits. Next, I chopped up three carrots and a few stalks of celery in chunks, put them in a bowl, scraped the mirepoix out of the sautee pan, and placed it on top of the fresh vegetables. Already the aroma was wafting through the house, reminiscent of the smell of the beginning preparations for a Thanksgiving feast.



After setting the bowl of vegetables aside, I took a whole chicken, rinsed it off, removed the raw gizzards inside, and fed them to my very grateful German Shepherd, Sasha, who wasted no time crunching them up. Then I filled I big pot about 2/3 full of sparkling clean well water, put the chicken in whole and placed it on the stovetop. When the water began to boil, I turned the heat down and let the chicken simmer for about 45 minutes. When chicken was cooked, I carefully removed it from the broth and let it cool slightly before deboning. The hardest, messiest, and least pleasant task is removing the skin and cleaning the tender chicken meat off the bones, at least in my opinion. Because this soup recipe uses both light and dark meat, I returned all the chicken bits to the pot.


Next, I added to the pot all the vegetables in the bowl that I had set aside. Now it was time to add the spices. Usually I use poultry seasoning or Bell's seasoning, a good measure of thyme, salt, and pepper; but today I am out of prepared seasonings and thyme, so I had to improvise. So instead I added a healthy dose of sage, a few bay leaves, about a dozen juniper berries, salt, and pepper, relying on the mirepoix to provide the rest of the seasoning. I then let the mixture simmer hard for another 20 minutes. When the vegetable chunks were nearly soft, it was time to add the chicken bits. I like to use light and dark meat in my soup recipe, so the entire chicken went back into the pot, sans carcass. I then brought the contents of the pot to a slow boil, added the entire bag of wide egg noodles. We like a lot of noodles in our chicken noodle soup, and besides, the pot was a huge blue enamel one. After about 10 minutes of simmering, lunch was served.