chicken noodle soup (for husband)

My husband is a man of simple tastes…in food that is. And while he loves all soups I make, he likes “just a clear soup, with some vegetables, and chicken.”

We’ve been dealing with colds of late. They just seem to keep hanging on. So husband made yet another request for “just a clear soup, with some vegetables, and chicken.”

Okay. I can do that.

Ingredients:
1 whole chicken or a whole bone-in breast and two leg/thigh quarters
2 ribs of celery, diced
3 carrots, diced
1 leek, diced (just the white part)
1/8 tsp. granulated roasted garlic (if you don’t have granulated roasted garlic you can drop a clove in the soup and then take it out before serving…husband doesn’t like a heavy garlic presence)
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup of dried parsley
salt to taste
8 to 12 cups of water
a cup of dried soup noodles, like alphabets or stars

Directions:
Dice all of the vegetables and drop them into a heated soup pot with 2 tablespoons of butter that has melted. Saute the vegetables for two to three minutes.
Wrap your chicken or chicken parts in cheesecloth (not necessary for flavor…but totally necessary if you don’t want chicken bones in your soup!)
Put your wrapped chicken in the pot.
Pour the water on top, so all the ingredients are covered.
Bring the soup to a boil and then simmer all day (at least 4 hours)

To serve:
Take the chicken out of the pot. Let cool slightly and pick the meat off the bones. Discard the bones.
Bring a pot of water to a boil and boil the noodles.
Drain the noodles.
Combine noodles with some of the soup broth and then add to the pot with the rest of the broth and vegetables.
Chop up the cleaned chicken meat and drop into the soup.

There will be a lot of breast meat available for chicken or chicken salad (another husband favorite) or just dump all the chicken into the soup.