Mennonite Chicken Noodle Soup

Today’s recipe goes hand in hand with the recipe I posted yesterday.  Heina sup? (chicken noodle soup) was the one dish that growing up we knew was always going to be consistent (my foster mother tended to switch up her recipes a lot).  And we looked forward to it!  And I don’t ever remember not enjoying it, unless it was made at Taunte Trudy’s (Aunty Trudy’s) house. 

The one thing that I always remember when I eat chicken noodle soup is butchering chickens at Taunte Trudy’s house when I was about 10 years old.  When I reached 10, that meant that I was old enough to start plucking the feathers off of the newly butchered chickens.  We didn’t have a feather plucking machine like I see nowadays.  What we did was boil water in a miergropa? (giant cauldron) and my foster mother would grab the dead chicken by its feet, dunk it in the boiling water, wait a few seconds, toss it to us, and we would then have to immediately start ripping out its feathers.  It was extremely hot, and extremely stressful, especially with my foster mother yelling at us “Shpoudy kingye! Shpoudy! Du must pluckin!” (Hurry up kids! Hurry up!).  And that wasn’t even the worst part.  I think the worst part was the smell.  Oh the smell!!  I can’t even start to describe it, but trust me, it was not pleasant!  From there, the adults would take the chickens, and singe the remaining feathers that we couldn’t pull out over a pan of burning alcohol.  And then the smell of burning feathers would coat the inside of my nose as well.  Then almost ritualistic-like, they would take the first freshly butchered and cleaned chicken to the kitchen, and tossed it in a pot of water to make soup for lunch.  So by the time we had finished killing and cleaning all of the chickens, it was lunch time.  So with multiple horrible smells still in my nose, and my clothes still damp from chicken water and my pant legs crusted with chicken blood, we would all go inside to eat fresh chicken noodle soup.  Now I like a good bowl of chicken noodle soup as much as the next guy, but this was just a little too fresh for me.  And the thing is, no one there seemed to have a problem with it except my sisters and I.  While we were dry heaving and trying to choke down spoonful after spoonful of this far-too-fresh chicken soup, everyone else was loving it and spoke of the freshness like it was a good thing. 

Now I may have turned some of you away from making chicken noodle soup, but I assure you that it is delicious! As long as it’s not made the same day that the chicken died.   This isn’t my foster mothers recipe, and to be honest, I don’t actually know what her recipe is.  I have come up with this variation from my foster mothers ‘a little bit of this and a little bit of that’ instruction as well as added the chinese five spice to make it my own.  I hope you try this recipe out and enjoy it as much as my family and I do.  You can use store bought egg noodles for it, but homemade egg noodles with homemade chicken noodle soup taste so much better.  You can find my recipe for homemade egg noodles here.

First you are going to need  a whole chicken, (thawed), 1 medium onion (chopped), 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of chinese five spice, 5 bay leaves, 5 star anise, 1 teaspoon of peppercorns, 1/2 teaspoon of parsley (not pictured), and a spice infuser.  If you do not have a spice infuser, you can just put everything directly into the pot, you will just have to strain the broth before serving. 

Next fill a large soup pot 3/4 of the way with water, add the whole chicken and cook on high.  Just before the water begins to boil, scoop off the layer of ‘scum’ and boil for 30 minutes with the lid on.

Place the star anise and peppercorns in a spice infuser and add to the pot along with the chopped onion, bay leaves, salt, and Chinese five spice (optional). Boil for another 2 hours with the lid partially set on the pot (if you want a stronger broth, boil longer, to taste).

Remove the chicken from the broth and debone it.  Cut the chicken meat into bite size pieces and put aside.  Skim off the onions and fat from the top of the broth and throw it out.  Put the chicken meat back in the broth, add parsley and boil for another 20 minutes.  Cook egg noodles in a separate pot and set aside (recipe found here). Add additional salt to taste.

Put pre-cooked egg noodles into broth,serve, and enjoy!

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