Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

This post is for Ang in Texas at St. Fairsted Farm, well, and everyone else who honors me with a visit here.  She made a post about her chicken & dumplings, and that got me hungry for Grandma Ree’s Chicken & Noddle dish.  Ummmm, so good.   I posted a short version over at her site in the comment section.  I thought of that 17# turkey we had for dinner on Thursday night, what should I do with it?  Then this morning it was raining, and cold, and this weather sealed my decision.

Oh, I could make turkey and gravy for dinner.  Or use it in Aunt Betty’s Chicken Casserole dish but then I’d have to run to the store for stuffin and mushrooms, which I didn’t want to do.

Besides,  I thought, I could post the recipe here for Grandma Ree’s Chicken & Noddle recipe, with pictures.  That’s what everyone called her; Grandma Ree even though her name was Marie.   She left this world about 20 yrs ago, before my kids got to meet her, and without me ever trying this dish made by her hands.   She was a nice, quiet woman who liked to listen to folks, but would always make a remark that would get everyone to chuckle.   She had pretty much stopped cooking by the time I came around so DH had to teach me how to make this dish.   He says my recipe is as good as he ever remembers it being, and seeing as how he taught me how to make this dish as his Grandma had taught him, I believe him.   My mouth waters for it often on a cold winter day.  Maybe as much as his does.

Around noon today I stripped all the meat off of the turkey bones, leaving a nice carcass of bones.  The bones went into the soup pot with a few carrots and onions.  I don’t bother peeling them,  or slicing them, why do all that extra work?   Next I headed to the freezer to see if I had any chicken bones or necks stashed away in there.  See I don’t waste any bones around here, putting them away in the freezer for a rainy-soup day.   Maybe it is my parents-depression roots coming through; waste-not-want-not.  Finding a bag of chicken bones and a few chicken necks were a bonus and they went into the soup pot too.  It’s been boiling now for 4 hours, long enough for the flavor to come out of the bones and into the water.  Soon I’ll put it through a sieve and separate all the bones from the broth.  Sometimes I let the broth cool and pull the fat off but this batch was almost all bones so I don’t need to do that step.

Into my food processer I put:

4 eggs, 3 cups flour, 4tsp baking powder and mixed the thing.   Adding the baking powder is one of the secrets to this recipe.  Next I put some flour onto the counter and dropped the ball on top of it:

It will be a bit wet to the touch too.  I knead it just a little bit and divide the dough in half.   Next I use a rolling pin, roll it out to about 1/8″ thick:

The other half of the dough is under that bowl.

And then I dump allot of flour on the surface.  You cannot use too much flour.  You can use too little flour and you’ll know it if you do that.  The dough will stick together.  Roll it lengthwise so you have a sausage.

Slice off noodles, about 1/4″ wide.  See all that flour sitting there?  Each slice gets unrolled (kids love to do this part), and put in the flour, dredged in the flour so it is so heavily coated you can’t see any yellow.   The 1/4″ width is not critical, but keep in mind these noodles swell cause of the baking powder.

Then let the noodles sit in the flour.   Until you are finished cutting that sausage-length of dough.  Next shake the noodles — you just lift them out of the flour and put them back down into the flour.

You are trying to make sure that they are truely covered with flour.   Umm, look at all those noodles:

And here I start with the other half of the dough:

Every couple times of rolling I flip the dough over and put a light dusting of flour on the counter.

It is getting thin enough here.  And there’s the heavy dose of flour again.  You cannot use too much flour at this point.  This flour plays a very vital role too.   I repeat the process again of rolling the dough, slicing off wedges, dredging them in the flour,….

Soon, with the soup in a rolling boil I will pick up some noodles, shake them just a little,  put them into the soup and stir.  Then I’ll repeat it again and again.  Once they are all in I’ll turn the heat down, and put a lid on the pot.  You cannot overcook these noodles!   Next I’ll cut up all the turkey meat I pulled off the bones earlier in the day and throw them into the pot.  The flour thickens the soup and makes this a thick mass of noodles and meat.

Grandma Ree never put veges into this soup and I don’t do that either.  It would break the tradition.

Now, here’s the rest of the story behind this dish.  Grandma Ree had many mouths to feed during the depression; her own 4 kids, her DH, her mother, and sometimes her Aunt and Uncle were at the table too.  During the depression you did what you could to stretch your food dollars and food items.  This dish could be made using the chicken bones from Sunday’s chicken dish and feed the family of 7 or 9 for a few dinners.  The extra flour just helped it stick to your ribs and keep growing kids from being hungry very soon.

It is easy to make, really.  Even if you have never made noodles before these are very forgiving.  The baking powder causes them to swell and expand, almost like a biscuit in the soup.  Let me know if you try it.  Now, I need to go finish this dish so we can have it for dinner although DH might insist that I let it cook for a few more hours since it does get better with age and cooking time.