I have been waiting for the southern California weather to start cooling down this fall, so the past couple weeks have been a real treat for me. I adore making soups, stews and casseroles — cold weather comfort foods — during fall and winter. Homemade soups are a particular favorite and specialty of mine. I often cook things like a ham just in anticipation of using the bone and leftover meat in a hearty soup.
Despite enjoying so many types of soup, I have never been a big chicken and noodle fan. It just usually tastes too bland for me.
So Paula Deen’s chicken noodle soup recipe really caught my eye. In addition to the typical carrots and celery, Paula adds mushrooms, which give a little more substance to the soup and a make for a nice earthy flavor. But, for me, the pièce de résistance is in the broth…it includes sherry and heavy cream. Oh my! No boring clear chicken broth here. Pure decadence, particularly when topped with the optional Parmesan cheese.
Jeff and I did not change a thing in this recipe. We opted for a pre-cut whole fryer chicken instead of hassling with doing it ourselves, and we chose to shred the chicken when cooked and cooled. We did include Parmesan cheese. Oh, and I sampled the sherry ahead of time to make sure it was still good.
This soup freezes and reheats quite well for leftovers.
- 1 (2½ to 3-pound) fryer chicken, cut up
- 3½ quarts water
- 1 onion, peeled and diced
- 1½ to 2 teaspoons Italian seasoning
- 1 teaspoon lemon-pepper seasoning
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 4 bay leaves
- 3 chicken bouillon cubes
- Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 2 cups sliced carrots
- 2 cups sliced celery, with leafy green tops
- 2½ cups uncooked egg noodles
- 1 cup sliced mushrooms
- 3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley leaves
- ⅓ cup cooking sherry
- 2 teaspoons chopped fresh rosemary leaves
- 1 cup grated Parmesan, optional
- ¾ cup heavy cream, optional
- Seasoning salt
- Freshly ground black pepper
- Crusty French bread, for serving
- Add all ingredients to a soup pot. Cook until chicken is tender, about 35 to 45 minutes.
- Remove chicken from pot and set aside to cool.
- Remove and discard bay leaves and onion. You should have approximately 3 quarts of stock.
- When chicken is cool enough to touch, pick bones clean, discarding bones, skin, and cartilage.
- Set chicken aside.
- Bring stock back to a boil, add carrots, and cook for 3 minutes. Add celery and continue to cook for 5 to 10 minutes.
- Add egg noodles and cook according to directions on package.
- When noodles are done, add chicken, mushrooms, parsley, sherry and rosemary.
- Add Parmesan and cream, if using. Cook for another 2 minutes.
- Adjust seasoning, if needed, by adding seasoning salt and pepper.
- Enjoy along with a nice hot crusty loaf of French bread.
Usually, my chicken soup consists of what I have on hand. Sometimes mushrooms, sometimes, no. Sometimes ginger, sometimes no. Sometimes parsley, sometimes cilantro. Sometimes both. 🙂 You get the idea.
We have sickies in the house today, so I decided to make a soup using all the goodies around the kitchen.
After reading this post, I decided to add some cream and sherry to the lunch portion today. The result? GOOD! Perhaps a little too sweet (but that was my fault for using rock sugar and sweet onions). I really like the addition of the sherry. I’m wondering what a little marsala or vermouth (also in the cabinet) would be like. Might try that for the dinner portion.
Thank you for the post!
OK, so I guess you can’t post photos with comments. Hmm. Hey Greenes, is it possible to get a photo or two up?
You “can” add pics to comments 1) if you know how to code an image tag in HTML (I did this for you), but 2) comments don’t the nice photo resizer, so you can see how it tweaks the layout of the comment space — note the scrollbar required to see your photos.
The fix? Link to a smaller resized version of your photos instead.
Or… better, just do a new blog post simply showing photos of your version of our soup, and link to this original soup recipe — like what we did for your shrimp taco recipe. As I modify a recipe, or try some of your recipes, I plan to post my own photos and just reference and link to the original recipe post.
If you do a new blog post, you can also just stick your photobucket links into the blog post photo editor, instead of uploading copies of these same photos. Just use the “From URL” option. It’ll even allow you to resize the version visible on our blog to fit the blog post space and eliminate scrollbars (without resizing your original image hosted on photobucket).
Great information, thank you!