For those of you who know about my world-famous … well, maybe at least St. Helens famous … home-made noodles, and aren’t clamoring for the recipe, I thought I’d share it with you anyway. This is from an old blog entry I made in December 2010.

Step 1: boil up a dead chicken the day before you plan to eat it. You can try it with a live one, but I don’t recommend it. It’s really hard to pluck a live chicken. Let it cool then put it in the refrigerator in preparation for the day you want to eat it. When the day comes, remove the dead chicken from the refrigerator and demand that your wife, or husband, rip all the meat from the bones. When they refuse, do it yourself. Keep the meat, dispose of the bones. Put the meat in the refrigerator while preparing the noodles.

Step 2: decide how many folks you plan to feed. That’s really not important. I’m just trying to mess you up. My rule is six eggs, no matter how many are going to eat. If there are enough people to eat noodles made from six eggs, you have too many people there. Today we fed 7 people and had plenty left over for tomorrow. Again, I ate twice. Like normal. Tomorrow I’ll do it again. No doubt.

So, you take your six eggs and break them into a fairly medium bowl. After picking out the little tiny bits of shell, take a salt shaker and put a thin layer of salt on each yolk. Removing the shell pieces really isn’t necessary, but it’s the right thing to do. Take the bowl to the sink, turn the faucet on low and quickly pass the bowl under the stream. You want some water, but definitely not too much. I’ve always pretended that my method of getting water in the bowl works out to a couple of tablespoons. The speed used to pass the bowl under the running faucet is crucial.

Step 3: using whatever you want, beat the hell out of the eggs until they are foamy. Doing this makes it a religious experience, suitable for Sunday. Once you’ve achieved a foaminess that pleases you, start adding flour, and mixing it in with the eggs. Keep doing this until it’s an absolutely sticky mess. Then add some more flour and keep mixing. When you get it to the point where poking your finger into it leaves a dent, but your finger doesn’t come out sticky, roll the mixture out onto the rolling surface that you prepared before step one. I know, I didn’t tell you about that but, really, you should have anticipated it. I use a Tupperware rolling sheet and an old fashion rolling-pin.

Step 4: before dumping the mixture onto the rolling surface remove between 2-3 cups of flour and dump it onto the middle of your rolling surface. Then dump the mixture and pour some more flour on top of it. Knead it like bread until it’s to the point where you can roll it out with your rolling-pin and it will pull back a little.

Step 5: Keep rolling it and flouring it, making sure it doesn’t stick to the rolling surface or the rolling pin. Roll it out until it’s about 1/8 of an inch thick. I guarantee that it will roll beyond the boundaries of the rolling surface. Sometimes I cut it in half to do the rolling but today I put a large piece of cardboard, that I found in the garage, under the rolling surface and it worked great! I didn’t get any flour on the floor like I usually do. Didn’t get any grease in the noodles, either.

Step 6: if your wife will let you, get a very sharp instrument that you will need to cut the rolled out dough into noodles. Sometimes I use the “everything cutter” that we’ve had for years. Most people call it a pizza cutter, but I cut all kinds of food with it for the kidlets, like pancakes, waffles, sausage, noodles, and pizza. It takes a little while to whittle out noodles with this tool, but there’s not a chance anyone would accuse you of buying the noodles because I guarantee they will not be uniform in size. That’s ok. If you have a multi-bladed noodle cutter, like I do, use that. It’s much quicker and doesn’t cut as deep when you get a finger in the way.

Step 7: separate the cut noodles, mixing in the flour. Add more flour, if you want, then leave them alone in a pile to rest. You can cover them with something if you want, but I never bother with that. I used to but no longer have the patience to wrap each noodle in it’s own little blanket. Takes too long, so now I just toss one of the kitchen towels, that we’ve been using to dry our hands, over them. If you chose this covering method, make sure it’s not real damp. There’s nothing worse than damp noodles.

Step 8: while the noodles are resting, heat up the broth you obtained while boiling the dead chicken. If you didn’t keep it, that’s OK because it never tastes very good anyway. If you did, add a bunch of chicken bullion, or something similar, to the water, or broth, and heat it up to a rolling boil. Add the bouillon until it tastes really good to you. No one else matters on this step. You’re the cook so please yourself.

Step 9: once you have it tasting, and boiling properly, add the noodles, flour and all. You’ll need to stir the noodles right away to separate them, making sure they don’t cook up in one huge lump. If that happens, just call it a dumpling and no one will know. Assuming you get them separated, and it’s boiling good, lower the heat and let it slowly boil, stirring once in a while to move them around. Check them once in a while, after about 15 minutes, to see if they’re done. For that part of this step, keep some Blistex handy because you will burn your lips and tongue. Every time. An alternative is to have one of the kids check doneness. You can only do this once because the second time you try, I’ve discovered, the police get involved.

Step 10: add the dead chicken to the noodles, stir it in and turn the heat off. Cover the pan with a lid, a plate, or another pan.

Step 11: make some mashed potatoes while the noodles are boiling. We always use instant because they are quick and we don’t want to wait.

Once the noodles are done, the broth will be thick like gravy which makes it perfect for putting on top of mashed potatoes. Before adding noodles, put at least 2 tablespoons of butter on the potatoes. This gives the plate a little color as the melted butter seeps out from under the noodles. It’s kind of like the noodles are squeezing the innards out of the potatoes which makes it fun for the kids.

It’s simple and, so far, everyone loves it. I suspect it’s fattening, too, but who cares?