Chicken Soup & Homemade Egg Noodles

Tonight I decided to make Chicken soup with homemade egg noodles.  I had a bit of roast chicken and vegetables left over from Sunday night and stock that I had made from the chicken carcass (isn't that a nice word?).  Which is the only reason I decided to make homemade noodles, since all the hard work for the soup was already done.

I heated up the broth, added the chicken and veggies and let them simmer while I made the noodles.  This was my first time making egg noodles and it was a little more difficult than I anticipated.  I followed Pioneer Woman's recipe.  You make egg noodles just like pasta...put flour on a board, make a well, add two eggs for every cup of flour and mix gently with your fingers until the dough comes together.  Then you knead the dough until it's smooth (which breaks down the gluten and makes the pasta tender).  Let the dough rest for a few minutes and then roll it out until it's thin enough to see a magazine cover through it (that's pretty darn thin)!  Cut the dough into thin strips of whatever length you want.

This sounds so darn simple, and I'm sure after I've done this ten or twenty times it will be...but my first time it wasn't too easy.  The dough was VERY sticky after everything was mixed together.  So sticky that I couldn't get more flour out of the container.  Thank goodness Ethan was practicing his Science presentation in the kitchen and could scoop more flour for me!  As he watched me enmeshed in the sticky goop that was hopefully going to become his dinner, he said "I really would like to learn to cook Mom...but I don't think I'll have a stove in my dorm room.  Are dorm rooms kind of like hotel rooms?"  He's definitely a non-linear thinker!

I continued to knead the dough, adding a lot of flour to get it to stop sticking.  After it seemed pretty smooth, I let it rest (and me too!), then rolled it out and cut it with a pizza cutter (cool trick!).  Notice how there are no pictures of all this fun?  With all the sticky dough all over my hands, there was no way to take pictures until the end.  Sorry about that...sticky dough pics would have been nice.

Here are the noodles after I've cut them.  I definitely did not get them rolled out thin enough...couldn't read anything through the dough!

Here's the chicken soup before adding the noodles.

And here's the final product.

The noodles really expand when you cook them, so I could have sliced them a lot thinner.  Even though the noodles weren't fabulous, they were ok and the soup was good.  Ethan ate three bowls of it (growing boy that he is)!

I'm sorry about the pictures...I'm having lighting issues that I'm working on this week.  I hope by next week I'll have a better lighting set up so my pictures will be a lot better!

PS...anyone want to take a pasta making class with me?  I'd love to learn how to do this well.  I have a feeling it could be oh so delicious!