This week's soup--Chicken-Corn Soup

Chicken-Corn Soup
Better Homes and Gardens Heritage Cook Book Copyright 1975

1 5- to 6-pound ready to eat stewing chicken, cut up I used four huge whole chicken legs (4-5lbs)
6 cups water
½ cup chopped onion
2 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 bay leaf
6 ears fresh corn (or 1 16-ounce can cream-style corn)I used 1 8-oz can cream-style corn and 1 8-ounce can whole kernel corn
1 ½ cups uncooked Homemade Noodles I added the whole batch, about 3 cups
1 cup chopped celery
2 tablespoons snipped parsley I only had dried so I added a sprinkle of that

In a large kettle, combine the chicken, water, onion, salt, pepper, and bay leaf. Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer, covered, till chicken is tender, about 2 hours. Meanwhile, with sharp knife, make cuts down center of corn kernels in each row of the ears. Cut corn off and scrape the cob. (Should be equal to 2 cups of corn.) Remove the chicken from the broth; cool and remove meat from bones. Cut chicken into bite-size pieces. Set aside. Skim excess fat from broth. (I made the broth the day before, chilled it, and removed all of the fat.) Discard bay leaf. Bring the broth to a boil. Add corn, the Homemade Noodles, celery, and parsley. Simmer, covered, till corn and noodles are barely done, about 8 minutes. Add cooked chicken and heat through, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

Makes 8 servings.
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Chicken-corn soup is the big soup in this area. It's usually made with dough balls or rivels (smaller pieces of dough) but I think I prefer the noodles. They usually add chopped hard-boiled eggs too but I don't think they add all that much to the soup. I've made chicken-corn soup plenty of times but this is the first time I followed a recipe. It turned out excellent. It had very good flavor.

I didn't realize this only used a half-batch of noodles so since I made an entire batch, I added all of them. That made for a thicker soup but that's how I like it. I goofed up and added the chicken back before boiling the noodles and the chicken got roughed up a bit too much and some of the pieces fell apart.

Of course, after having practically winter weather all last week, when I made this soup this weekend the weather had warmed up again. Luckily it didn't get too warm (did I just say that?)

Soup has been going over rather well for Sunday dinner. It's relatively inexpensive too. I used about $4 worth of chicken and the rest of the ingredients were inexpensive. I had a couple of lunches left over too. This made a lot of soup but my husband can pack away a lot of soup so other people might end up with more than just a couple of lunches left over.

The time change is really messing me up.

Question of the Day: What do you like in chicken soup - noodles (what shape?), dough balls, rivels, rice? I'll take anything made out of 'dough' over rice. Oooh, growing up, capelettis (little hat-shaped stuffed pastas) in chicken soup were a huge treat.