Chicken Noodle Soup

One of my go-to lunches is soup. When I'm home by myself, I like to avoid a fuss, stick something on the stove, and five minutes later, presto! Food! Depending on the kind of soup, I pair it with some kind of bread (or cracker) and call it a day.

Though I wouldn't necessarily put canned soup into the same category as chips or cookies, it's hard to argue that it's not a pre-packaged food, especially when you get to the middle of the ingredients list and you no longer know what you're reading. So for the next month, my easy go-to lunch is gone. If I want soup now, I'm going to have to cook up big batches and store them in the fridge. Enter the homemade chicken noodle soup!

One of the things I like about chicken noodle soup is that, at its base, it's really quite easy. You basically throw everything into the pot, let it boil a bit and then it's good to go. If you wanted to, you could use store bought chicken broth/stock, buy a cooked chicken from the store and pull the meat off the bones, and chop up whatever veggies you want. Or, you can make it more "complicated": make your own stock, cook your own chicken, thicken it up with some flour, whatever.

As I already had stock made, I picked up a chicken breast with skin & bone from the store (since I can't stand the flavor of the rotisserie chickens available to me at my Whole Foods, just not my combination of herbs). I added the veggies I like (not a big fan of celery--especially since the organic ones seem to be so salty! Anyone else have this problem?), threw in my egg noodles and herbs and had soup.

I enjoyed a bowl...and then Matt got home...and ate all the rest (though not at one sitting!).

So since the weather is changing, and spring is on its way (yay!!), I encourage all of you to sneak in that one last bowl of soup before it gets too warm.