Chicken Noodle Soup! Or, Theresa Actually Cooks Real Stuff!

I decided that today, I was in the mood to cook something really fancy. So I went to one of my fanciest cookbooks, and picked out a recipe. Oddly, the Mission Of Hope Cancer Fund cookbook? Really fancy. It's even got a recipe in it from one of the Iron Chefs. And we're not talking Cat Cora or Michael Symon here kids. We're talking Chen Kinichi. Oh, yeah. Apparently he cooks at (or cooked at at the time of the book being published) a restaurant in New Orleans. Of all the places in the world, right?

At any rate, I selected Chicken Noodle Soup. Except I did it the semi-homemade kind of way.

The recipe called for an onion, a full bunch of celery and 2 cups of carrots. And peas. And a full fryer chicken!

I had a couple of things working against me here, that lead to my embracing the "semi-homemade" version of this recipe:

1)I only had $20, and had to purchase EVERY ingredient on the list

2)I cook for a picky eater who was likely to pick out only the chicken and the noodles and waste all this celery

3)It was 4 pm, and I didn't want to have to mess with cooking a whole chicken.

So the good people at Kroger kind of saved me here. They have frozen mirepoix, which covered me for onions and celery (and carrots), and then I got a frozen bag of peas to cover me there. Throw in a $5 chicken, and a bag of egg noodles, and your pretty well out the door!

It doesn't call for any herbs or anything. Brown the vegetables, put in the chicken (of course, if your not doing it the semi-homemade way, you have to cook the chicken and all of that), stock, noodles. Set.

I did make a blunder at the end, and I dumped in the entire bag of noodles, which made it really chunky (it made it pretty much entirely noodles and chicken, I won't kid you), but if you are like my boyfriend and like the stuff out of soup but not the broth, then even the blunder isn't so bad. :)

I don't have permission to republish the recipe, although I wish I could. It's very simple soup, but very delicious. Although admittedly, it didn't satisfy my urge to cook fancy food. So that was a bummer.