Photo by Jessica Bee
I'm sure it was great. I wouldn't know--I was asleep on the couch by 10:30, after we spent a busy evening reorganizing our kitchen cabinets, making chicken noodle soup with homemade noodles, and baking a couple loaves of bread. We also watched X-Men 3. All in all? A perfect evening.
One of our goals for the new year is to cook more out of actual cookbooks--we have a ton of them, after all--and there's something pleasantly nostalgic about actually opening a book to find a recipe. So last night, the noodles, the soup, and the bread all came (at least loosely) from the Betty Crocker Cookbook we borrowed from Matt's mom while we were home. Now, times have changed a little, and while we won't be adding a heaping tablespoon of straight monosodium glutamate to our soup, or brushing the tops of our bread loaves with margarine, there are still hundreds of time-tested from-scratch recipes in there. In particular, our egg noodles (made with half whole-wheat flour and half white) turned out spectacularly! We used half of them in our chicken noodle soup, and plan to make Swedish meatballs to serve over the other half. Here's the recipe:
The chicken came from a whole roasted bird we bought at Whole Foods. We made half the meat into chicken and noodles, and the other half into chicken and broccoli stir-fry (before we left for the midwest). We then covered the carcass with water in the crockpot, added a few carrots, onions, and celery, and cooked it overnight. We ended up with several quarts of nice chicken stock, as well as a decent amount of meat we'd left clinging to the bones. We put it all in the freezer to deal with when we got back. Yesterday, we cooked up about a quart of the stock, added some water, carrots, celery, onion, parsley, black pepper, and salvaged chicken meat. We put it all on to cook for about an hour, and added the egg noodles in the last 10 minutes of cooking. The white flecks in the soup? The egg whites (leftover from the noodles) that we couldn't bear to throw away, so we just mixed them into the soup, egg-drop, style, for a little extra protein.
The other thing we made was Betty Crocker's whole-wheat bread. We've had a variety of wheat bread successes and failures around here, but it seems like we have a tendency to get air bubbles in our loaves, and the loaves don't tend to rise/cook all the way. Betty includes a very specific method of shaping the loaf (maybe this is standard? nobody ever told me before) that seemed to cut down on the problem.
The result? A very respectable wheat loaf. It's not anything exciting, in terms of taste and texture, but it is pleasant and mild. I think we'd make it again.
One of our goals for the new year is to cook more out of actual cookbooks--we have a ton of them, after all--and there's something pleasantly nostalgic about actually opening a book to find a recipe. So last night, the noodles, the soup, and the bread all came (at least loosely) from the Betty Crocker Cookbook we borrowed from Matt's mom while we were home. Now, times have changed a little, and while we won't be adding a heaping tablespoon of straight monosodium glutamate to our soup, or brushing the tops of our bread loaves with margarine, there are still hundreds of time-tested from-scratch recipes in there. In particular, our egg noodles (made with half whole-wheat flour and half white) turned out spectacularly! We used half of them in our chicken noodle soup, and plan to make Swedish meatballs to serve over the other half. Here's the recipe:
I don't know if we'll ever buy dried pasta again!Betty Crocker's Egg NoodlesMatt, drying the noodles on our drying rack!
2 cups all-purpose or whole-wheat flour
3 egg yolks
1 egg
2 teaspoons salt
1/4-1/2 cup water
Make a well in the center of flour. Add egg yolks, egg, and salt; mix thoroughly. Mix in water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until dough is stiff but easy to roll.
Divide dough into 4 equal parts. Roll dough, one part at a time, into paper-thin rectangle on well-flour cloth-covered board (keep remaining dough covered). Loosely fold rectangle lengthwise into thirds; cut crosswise into 1/8-inch strips for narrow noodles, 1/4-inch strips for wide noodles. Shake out strips and place on towel until stiff and dry, about 2 hours.
Break dry strips into smaller pieces. Cook in 3 quarts boiling salted water until tender, 12-15 minutes; drain. ABOUT 5 CUPS NOODLES. After drying, noodles can be covered and stored no longer than 1 month.
The chicken came from a whole roasted bird we bought at Whole Foods. We made half the meat into chicken and noodles, and the other half into chicken and broccoli stir-fry (before we left for the midwest). We then covered the carcass with water in the crockpot, added a few carrots, onions, and celery, and cooked it overnight. We ended up with several quarts of nice chicken stock, as well as a decent amount of meat we'd left clinging to the bones. We put it all in the freezer to deal with when we got back. Yesterday, we cooked up about a quart of the stock, added some water, carrots, celery, onion, parsley, black pepper, and salvaged chicken meat. We put it all on to cook for about an hour, and added the egg noodles in the last 10 minutes of cooking. The white flecks in the soup? The egg whites (leftover from the noodles) that we couldn't bear to throw away, so we just mixed them into the soup, egg-drop, style, for a little extra protein.
The other thing we made was Betty Crocker's whole-wheat bread. We've had a variety of wheat bread successes and failures around here, but it seems like we have a tendency to get air bubbles in our loaves, and the loaves don't tend to rise/cook all the way. Betty includes a very specific method of shaping the loaf (maybe this is standard? nobody ever told me before) that seemed to cut down on the problem.
The result? A very respectable wheat loaf. It's not anything exciting, in terms of taste and texture, but it is pleasant and mild. I think we'd make it again.
1 comment:
That is how I always shape a loaf of bread. I don't know where I learned it, but it has always produced a very nice looking and great textured loaf of bread.
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