Chicken Noodle Soup New Orleans Style

Servings: 6
Ingredients:

1 lg Whole fryer
1 c  Diced onions
1/2 c  Diced celery
1/2 c  Minced parsley
4    Cloves minced garlic
1 c  Chopped carrots
3    Bay leaves
1 ts Poultry seasoning
4 qt Bottled water (I used
-regular tap water)
12 oz Broad egg noodles
2 tb Butter
1 c  Sliced onion rings
1 c  Sliced mushrooms (I left
-these out)
1 c  Diced carrots
1/4 c  Cream sherry

SOURCE: Cathy Keller.

Tabasco sauce Salt and pepper to taste Green onions for garnish

First, take the chicken and wash it thoroughly - that means both inside and
out! Remove the giblets, scrub out the internal cavity under cold running
water, and scrape away anything that doesn’t look edible. (But DO NOT
remove the chicken skin or any of the fat! You need the skin to make a
rich stock.) Next, take a crock pot (see Note below if you don’t have a
crock pot) and place the chicken and giblets into it. Then drop in the
diced onions, the 1/2 c of celery, the 1/2 c of minced parsley, the garlic,
chopped carrots, bay leaves, poultry seasoning and 2 quarts of water. Then,
with a spoon, evenly distribute the seasoning mixture around the chicken,
turn the crock pot to HIGH, and cook for at least six hours (or better
still, OVERNIGHT). Remember, the longer you cook, the richer the base
stock and the more tender the chicken. While the chicken is slow-cooking,
it’s a good time to prepare your noodles

Go ahead and boil them according to package directions… but DO NOT COOK
THEM UNTIL DONE! Keep in mind that you’re going to drop them into a soup,
so you want them el dente (firm), otherwise they’ll turn to pure mush by
the time you eat them. Furthermore, you want a small percent of the starch
in the noodles to cook into the soup to thicken it slightly - if you cook
the noodles all the way, the soup’s consistency will be flat and thin.
After the noodles are cooked, butter them slightly and set them aside. When
the chicken is tender, take a set of tongs or a strainer spoon, remove it
from the crock pot (it may tend to fall apart, but that’s okay), and set it
on a platter to cool. At this point, strain out all the seasoning
vegetables from the stock, place the stock into a metal bowl, and place the
bowl into the refrigerator or freezer until the chicken fat congeals (which
should take about 1 hour). Meanwhile, pick the chicken off the bones and,
with a sharp knife, chop it into bit-sized pieces. Then, in a heavy 12-inch
skillet, melt the butter and saute the sliced onions, mushrooms, and
carrots until they’re tender. Then drop in the chopped chicken meat. And
over medium-low heat, cook it into the vegetables for about 10 minutes.
While the chicken and vegetables are sauteing, remove the chicken stock
from the refrigerator, skim off all the fat, and place the skimmed stock
into a soup pot, along with the remaining 2 quarts of water. At this point,
you should season the soup stock to taste with salt and pepper. Now drop in
the sauteed chicken, mushrooms, onion rings and diced carrots - along with
the sherry, the Tabasco*, and as soon as it comes to a boil, reduce the
heat to low and simmer the soup for about 30 minutes to allow all the
flavors to thoroughly blend. When you’re ready to eat, ladle out heaping
helpings of the piping hot soup into bowls, garnish with a sprinkling of
thinly sliced green onions, and serve with crunch saltines.

*I just put a couple of drops of Tabasco in there

NOTE: I found a REAL bargain on chicken hindquarters, so used them… was
out of parsley, so omitted that. USED the mushrooms and they are heavenly
in it. Didn’t use the sherry, though I think it would be really good. And
was out of flat noodles, so used a good handful of vermicelli broken into
about 2′ lengths, and just simmered in the soup. It was REALLY good.

Posted by Marge Clark Courtesy of Fred Peters.