Chicken Noodle Soup

As I mentioned the other day I was going to be making some chicken noodle soup to freeze for the winter. I had been organizing my pantry when I came across 8 cartons of chicken broth that needed to be used asap.

Now I've never made chicken noodle soup before. I usually preferred the canned variety. I knew pretty much what needed to be in the soup but wasn't sure how it was to be made. Off to the Internet I went. There are TONS of different soup recipes! After looking through a few of them I pretty much had it figured out how I was going to make my soup.

This soup...



This one bowl of soup that I had to test turned out to be the BEST chicken noodle soup ever!! I don't usually like to toot my own horn, but I was so impressed with how well and nummy it turned out.

It turned out so well that I just had to share my recipe!

I found the biggest pot that I had, which turned out to be my canning pot, because I had 8 cartons of chicken broth. So start with a very large pot.

In my pot I put...

8 cartons = 8 quarts of chicken broth
3-4 quarts of water
2 whole chickens

I used two whole chickens that were about 3 pounds each. We had purchased these from a local farm and I put them right in to cook. You could also use rotisserie chickens from the grocery store if you wanted to save some time.

I added...
2 stalks of celery (chopped up)
1 large bag (from Sam's) of carrots (chopped up)
1 onion (chopped up)

That's it!! You can add other things if you want or fewer things if you want.

I let this cook for a few hours until the chicken meat was starting to fall off the bone. I pulled out the chickens and let them cool. Once they were cool I picked off all the meat and put it back into the pot. I added some pepper and some seasoning. I found I had oregano and bay leaves on hand.

Then I added 2 large bags of egg noodles and let them cook. Once they were cooked I took it off the stove. It's possible that the noodles might get a little mushy once reheated so you may not want to cook them all the way if you prefer they are more "al dente". You could even cook them and add them when you were going to eat the soup.

Either way this was so easy and made a ton of soup!!



Then I got out my Food Saver and put about 2.5 quarts in each one. I now have 6 very large bags of frozen soup for the winter.



I love stocking my pantry and freezer with food!!