Recipes

Chicken Noodle Soup

Ingredients

Ingredients:

• Whole chicken, cut up (tutorial for cutting a whole chicken can be found here)
• Water
• 1 medium/large onion
• 2 small carrots (or 1 large carrot)
• 1 stalk of celery
• Chicken and beef bouillon cubes
• Salt and Pepper (to taste)
• Thin egg noodles (make separate)

Instructions:

1. Before starting, make sure that you rinse the chicken thoroughly with cold water.
2. Once your chicken is rinsed, place pieces into a large pot.  Depending on how large the chicken is, you may not want to put in all pieces.  We usually leave two pieces out of the soup and freeze for future use.
3. Fill pot with water (I usually fill about 3/4 of the pot)
4. Place pot with chicken and water on stove top on high heat.  
5. After about 10 minutes, you should see some foam rise to the top.  Remove all foam using a ladle.  Reduce heat as to not let a rapid boil develop.
6. Peel your onion and cut horizontally into 4-6 thin slices.  Place cut up onion on frying pan and fry on each side until onions are nicely browned.
7. Clean, peel, and cut up carrot into 1 inch pieces
8. Clean and cut up celery stalk into 1 inch pieces
9. Drop in fried onion, celery, and carrot into the pot
10. Drop in one cube of chicken bouillon and one cube of beef bouillon
11. Let everything simmer on a medium setting for 60-90 minutes.  The water should not be rapidly boiling.  The longer the soup simmers, the better it usually tastes. :)
12. During this waiting time is when I cook my noodles.  I recommend thin egg noodles boiled in lightly salted water until soft.
13. Once soup is near complete, add salt and pepper to taste and let simmer for a few more minutes.

Your soup is now done!  Enjoy! :)

Cinnamon Swirl Banana Bread

Ingredients

For the bread:
• 3 over-ripe bananas, smashed up
• 1/3 cup melted butter
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp baking soda
• dash of salt
• 1 1/2 cups flour
For the swirl:
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 Tbs cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350. Butter and four a loaf pan. Mine was 9 x 5, but you could use any sort, I suppose. Just keep a close eye on it in the oven, and adjust the time as needed.

Directions

1. Mix bananas, butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla together. sprinkle baking soda and salt around on top of the banana mixture. Then gently stir in flour. Be careful not to over-mix!
2. In a small dish, mix together the 1/3 cup sugar and 1 Tbs cinnamon.
3. Add 1/2 of the batter to the loaf pan and then sprinkle half, or a little more than half of the cinnamon-sugar mixture all over the batter in the pan. Add the rest of the batter, and then sprinkle the leftover cinnamon-sugar on top.
4. Bake for 50-60 minutes, but remember, if you’re using a different-sized loaf pan, be careful and keep a close eyeball on it!