I’m going off script here and decided to share my family’s favorite dish that I make, once in a while. I’m not incorporating this in my Letters to Diane because she’s seen me make it at least 100 times, so it’s nothing new. I think she liked it pretty much every time, too, or she said that so I’d keep on cooking. Either way, I’m OK with it.

So, Chicken & Noodles is a pretty basic dish made with raw eggs salt flour & water. Oh, and a well boiled chicken.

Let’s do the chicken first…

Unless you have them running around in the yard, go to your favorite grocery store and buy a whole chicken. Size doesn’t matter. Remove the chicken from its plastic bag and put it into a large pot of boiling water. Put a lid on the pot and forget about it for a couple of hours.

Then gather all the ingredients you’ll need for the noodles. While searching for mine I thought I might have to go to the store for flour. After digging around in the cupboards for a while a small container of flour revealed itself, saving me a trip.

I used to use a hard, roll up plastic Tupperware sheet to work the noodles into shape, but Diane got a silicon version which is way better.

Eggs – use as many as you want, depending on how large the crowd is that will eat the end product. I usually use 3, but this is for the extended family so I used 6. This doesn’t happen often because it makes a lot of noodles.

I used a medium bowl to get my eggs started.

What we’re going to do, if you’re making this for Sunday Dinner, is use a tool that allows you to beat the Hell out of the eggs. I use this device;

Sorry about the repeat egg photo. I showed up and I can’t make it go away, so just ignore it.

The first thing you must do is put a layer of salt open each egg so it looks a little like this:

Then you use the tool of choice to whip the eggs. After whipping them into a frenzy, start adding flour, if you have flour. If not, go get some. Starting this, when I couldn’t find my flour I was right on the edge of using pancake almond flour. I don’t know how that would have worked out, but feel free to experiment.

I don’t measure anything so have no idea how much flour I used. All I can tell you is that that container on the left was almost full when I started. I used that huge poon to add the flour.

I use a dinner fork to mix the flour into the beaten eggs and it works for me. You may wish to use something else.

Keep mixing in flour until you get tired then do it some more, until you can do this with it.

On your roll out sheet, put a bunch of flour into the center then put the mixture on top.

I never noticed the crack you can see here. Apparently we had an earth quack during this process and I missed it.

Then you get your handy roller and spread the mixture all over the sheet. When you see spots with no flour on it, add a spoonful and smear it around with your clean hand.

Now, when rolling out the noodle dough, look for this. It will pull back on itself about an inch which, in this case, I deemed to be appropriate for these noodles. It just looked and felt right.

Then I flip the sheet to put all that loose flour on top of the noodle dough. We’re going to use all of it.

Now that you have it rolled flat, it’s time to make it look like noodles. I generally use a pizza cutter to do that, but I’m going to show you a couple of ways that work.

Here’s the pizza cutter results:

Here’s what my Mom used to do … roll up the flat sheet of dough and slice each noodle at a time with a sharp knife.

Then you have to unravel the noodles. As you can see, using the roll and cut method, you can get some epic noodles to share.

After unraveling them, mix all of them with a generous dose of flour.

Then you take the noodles, one at a time, if you wish, and put them into the boiling pot of broth you made when you boiled the chicken. I’m not going to go through the process of removing all the skin, bones, and gristle from the broth because it’s pretty gross. And, you might like the extra challenge of separating the noodles from bones, etc, while you eat them. That’s not me. I take all that stuff out before the noodles are introduced to the pot.

After putting the noodles into the broth, go clean up your counter and add all the flour you can recover into the pot. You can see I missed with some of it, but that’s easily resolved by vacuuming the stove when I’m done.

Now you just let the pot boil for a couple of hours on Lo, or until the noodles are done to your satisfaction. When you’ve reached this point, get the chicken pieces you removed from the carcass and add it to the noodles. Since the chicken meat has already been cooked, all you need to do is warm it up in the broth, or you can let it simmer for a couple hours like I do.

At the dinner table we use a large gravy ladle to put the noodles over a pile of mashed potatoes. There is no green things in my broth but you can certainly add vegetables, if you wish. For me, I add a cube of butter to the potatoes on my plate, cover it with salt and pepper (you can skip the pepper, Terry), then smother the pile with noodles and gravy. If you used all your flour, the broth will be thick and you’ll understand why we use a gravy ladle.

That’s it.

I must end this with the caveat that we don’t eat this much starch often which makes it easy to pig out on it. Another good thing about this dinner treat, is that it lasts a while in the form of leftovers.

Enjoy. If any of you actually follow these instructions, I applaud your willingness to fill in the blanks with your imagination and ask that you share with us how things turned out.

Cheers