As children, we all have our favorite meals, and usually the recipes used by our mothers top the food charts. As a young boy, I loved southern fried chicken, not unlike that which made the Kentucky Colonel famous, but of course Mom's was better. Served with mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet peas and corn on the cob, that meal couldn't be beat.
When I became a teenager, however, a new favorite emerged. Homemade German egg noodles. I've since learned they are called spatzle or spaetzle, but we just called them noodles most of the time. Single batches soon became insufficient, and she bagan making double batches so that I could enjoy leftovers the next day.
These days, as my wife and I try to avoid further midsection sprawl with a low-carb approach to eating, I seldom cook any intentionally high carb dish like noodles, but back then, the delicious homemade chicken soup that included sweet peas along with chopped celery and onions was an afterthought in the dish, simply a delivery mechanism for those delicious noodles. In fact, I often avoided eating the chicken to save room for noodles. How times have changed.
Today is a cool, foggy day in Redondo Beach, and the idea of some hot comfort food sounds quite enticing, so I decided to throw Dr. Atkins to the wind today. Hopefully Julie will forgive the residual flour in the soup.
As a nod to the low carb life, however, I will cut back to a half batch of noodles.
I wrote that introduction yesterday in the morning. Contrary to my usual approach of telling you about some Q-CC meal I recently prepared, I was obviously consciously deciding to not only start with a recipe, but for that recipe to be neither low carb nor, more significantly, Quick-Clean Cuisine.
The reason for starting with the recipe was...well... I actually don't have a recipe. When I would tell Mom how much I enjoyed her noodles, she would laugh and say it is really the easiest thing: just flour and eggs. I thought I had written down Mom's recipe, which she had learned from my Dad's Mother, but I couldn't remember seeing it in years, so I decided I better do a little online research. That's where I learned about the German name spaetzle, although I'm not sure that was even the right kind of noodle. I will share my plan for what I prepared yesterday, and give you some results in bold italics, just to be clear when I wrote what.
The soup takes longer than the noodles themselves, so we'll start there.
Boil 8 cups of water in a big pot. Chop a quarter of an onion and stir into the pot of water.
My mom used to use a whole chicken, but Julie and I prefer the white meat, and since I bought a packet of boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $1.97 a pound at Smart and Final the day before (having used the other half of the package for stir fry the previous evening), there was no reason not to use them. Split chicken breasts, by the way, can also be used, if you get enough of a price break to compensate for the weight of the bones, but yesterday they were $1.79 per pound. If you do use the split chicken breasts, I recommend boiling them for 45 minutes and then taking them out of the water to get rid of the bones and skin, which are easily removed once cooked. Either way, at 45 minutes in, take the chicken out of the pot and cut it into into bite sized strips.
Stir in a can of Campbell's Cream of Chicken Condensed Soup and cook a little more.
After about 15 minutes, see if it needs some salt, and then sprinkle in whatever you think it needs. Definitely sprinkle in some pepper.
Stir in a half bag of C & W Early Harvest Petite Peas, or more if you want a lot of peas.
Chop up two or three stalks of celery into small pieces, and then stir those in.
Actually, what I described above is a good chicken soup recipe. Sweet peas are not considered Atkins-friendly, because of their high sugar count, but you can really put about any vegetables in the pot and they taste really good. This is one of my granddaughter Emma's favorite dishes, although she certainly enjoys having rice, noodles, potatoes, bread or anything else, because she burns off a lot of calories growing, doing ballet and running up and down ramps. I've found that since turning 30, I simply don't perform Swan Lake often enough to not pack on pounds when I eat starches. Had I stopped at this point, that would be basically a great Q-CC recipe.
Now comes the noodles, and for this we need to take the unusual Q-CC step of getting out a separate medium-sized mixing bowl.
Microwave about a quarter cup of water in a clean cup for about 30 seconds to get it warm and then put it aside to use later.
Also, cover your cutting board with a piece of Reynolds Cut Rite Wax Paper, because even though we're going outside the Q-CC paradigm, we want to make it a controllable mess. Sprinkle the surface of the wax paper with flour to create a working surfact to be used later for making noodles.
As usual with me, the recipe varies depending on the exact way the ingredients look to me on any given day, but separate the egg whites from the yolks for two or three eggs. You can use the egg whites to make an omelette the next morning, but let's go crazy, violating all rules of Quick-Clean Cuisine, and make a meringue dessert with them instead, messing up another cooking dish.
When I say I usually don't have an exact recipe any time I cook, that's true. However, at least I know basically how the recipe goes. I was going on memory. I remembered seeing a clear custard dish in the refrigerator with egg whites in it after my mom while my mom made noodles, and I figured she must be using the egg yolks, since several of the spatzle recipes I saw online used mostly egg yolks. Notice that the dish count is adding up already, which means more dishwashing, which is a Q-CC no no.
To separate the eggs, put the meringue cooking dish next to your noodle mixing bowl. Crack open an egg over the top of the meringue dish and slowly tip the egg back and forth, allowing the clear portion to trickle into the dish. Once there is nothing but yolk left, pour that into the noodle mixing bowl.
If you accidentally drop the yolk into the egg white bowl, you can actually scoop it back up and move it over without too much trouble. This is what happened, and by scoop it up, I mean I put my hand in the egg white bowl and picked up the yolk in my fingers. It was a gooey mess.
Repeat separating for another egg. If you find one of these eggs has a kind of clumpy piece of clear gel that won't separate, just put that into the mixing bowl along with the yolks. Of the three eggs, you want about one egg's worth of "white" anyway.
Actually, I wrote that paragraph after separating the eggs and finding one had a bunch of clear gel attached to it. I did wash my hands before keyboarding that in. Essentially, I was just reporting what I saw, and I had begun to question using only egg yolks anyway.
Once you have all of the egg yolks and about one egg white in the mixing bowl and have washed the egg residue from your fingers with antibiotic soap, add 1/4 teaspoon of salt and gradually stir in a cup of flour. You'll probably need about 2 or 3 tablespoons of the water you microwaved to get the mixture moist enough. When it is thoroughly mixed, transfer it to the wax paper-covered cutting board. Put another piece of wax paper on top of it and press it down.
At this point, I have to say it looked more yellow than I remembered Mom's noodles, but I nonetheless followed the directions I had written earlier. That was a mistake. The dough was way too wet, and despite the flour on the bottom paper, it stuck to it, and the unfloured wax paper on top became one with the dough like Luke Skywalker with the Force. Well, I thought, maybe if I let it sit there a while, it will dry out. Wrong. Finally, I threw it out, looked back at the internet recipes, retraced the stops up to transfering it to the cutting board and changed the directions to this, which is much closer to the truth:
Once it is all mixed to a point where it is too thick to stir, begin kneading it with your hands, gradually adding in more flour until it is no longer sticky. Let it rest for about 15 minutes to a half hour, then move the ball of dough onto the flour-dusted wax paper-covered cutting board.
Of course, by this time, I had already wasted so much time that I was in too much of a hurry to wait a half hour, so a short 15 minutes and I was onto the next step.
Dust the dough with more flour and flatten the dough as much as you can by hand. Dust it again, and then turn it over. Keep dusting it with flour, flattening it and flipping it until it gets thin. I don't have a rolling pin, but if you have a one, you can break out that bad boy right now. Or, if you don't have one and your hands aren't strong enough to flatten it by hand just find a relatively symmetrical drinking glass and use that to roll it flat, never applying so much pressure that you might break the glass. A thick Guinness glass would be a good choice. And I had a glass of Guinness in it later which was an even better choice.
Once it is about a quarter inch thick or thinner, cut it into strips about a half inch to an inch wide. Note that these don't need to be perfectly uniform, and they won't look anything like those thin flat noodles you buy at the store. That's part of the charm of homemade noodles.
I would actually say they should rest about a half hour before cutting them too, but by now I was really behind on adding the noodles to the pot.
At this point, you "let them rest," or basically just sit there for a half hour or so before adding them to the soup to boil for 15 minutes. I think they rested maybe 5 minutes before I threw them in the soup pot. Once they're cooking, you can throw away the wax paper, being sure to avoid incidentally dusting your kitchen with flour.
In the mean time, let's make that meringue dessert. What the hell was I thinking? Whip the egg whites thoroughly. Then, add two tablespoons of Splenda Granulated for Baking for each egg. Four tablespoons equals a quarter cup, if you have two eggs and prefer a more exact measurement for your Splenda. Whip that up thoroughly, and just before putting it in the oven, spray on a little Pam so that it browns like meringue made with sugar. Bake at 325 degrees for 20 minutes.
Perhaps you're thinking I forgot to put a lemon pie under that.
This is where my morning directions ended, and the recipe on the Jello box I read at Target looked like even more of a mess for a pie that I don't particularly like, so I thought I would try the meringue alone, and possibly serve it with sugar free dark chocolate. I had one problem. Despite the fact that the meringue directions said that if I whipped the egg whites and sugar, the concoction would grow to twice the volume and form ridges, it just looked like some soapy bath water. "Mademoiselle, ees zat how you make zee soup?" Nonetheless, I put it in the oven, spraying it with Pam cooking spray, as Splenda says is necessary for a natural baked brown look.
However, while taking so long to make this light dessert, I ignored the noodles, and the next thing I knew they had cooked for a half hour or more. When I took the lid off the soup I couldn't help but notice that the pot was almost completely dry. The noodles weren't at all wet and fluffy-soft but rather dry and hard. Worse, the soup had no liquid left in it, and the bottom was burning. Plus with all the water cooked away, I could see that my previous little mistake of pouring closer to 3/4 of a bag of petite peas had resulted in a LOT of big peas, and Julie doesn't like peas.
On cue, Julie arrived home and asked, "What's that smell?" She looked at me and laughed.
Three days ago, I had been up in Canoga Park painting a popcorn ceiling using spray cans of special popcorn touch up paint, as requested by the buyers of our rental condo that's in escrow. The ceiling "paint" is a light, powder-like substance that adheres to the popcorn ceiling without weighting it down so that it doesn't break away, and I have to say it works great, but residue also falls on the person spraying, and when I returned home that night my hair was thick with goop, my face was a much whiter shade of pale, my nostrils were filled with white nose hairs and the graphic of Tony Gwynn getting his 3000th hit for the Padres on my belly was about as white as the rest of my white tee shirt. As I stood in the kitchen three days later making noodles, I looked down at my black sweatshirt and jeans and realized I had created almost as much of a mess. "It's a noodle haulocost!" I exclaimed.
While Julie went upstairs to change clothes, still laughing at me, I put all the noodles into one bowl and began sorting the chicken into a bowl for her dinner, feverishly eating peas with a spoon to bring them down to a halfway acceptable level. The chicken was good. And so were the peas for that matter. Sure, there a lot of dry soup was burned to the bottom of the pan, but as the family joke still goes, "Wes likes the burned parts."
The noodles, however, just weren't very good, although I was surprised to see Julie going back to have a few more, picking them up with her fingers, after she finished her chicken. That's why we don't have many starches in the house. We can't resist them, even when they aren't particularly good.
Unfortunately, as you may have surmised, this is not a good recipe for making noodles. Julie said my mom used to use a separate pot of water like spaghetti just for the noodles, and then added them to the soup, and I think when our family came over with all my noodle-loving kids, she would have had to do that, because we ate so much at one sitting. In any case, at the least I should have added a lot more water at some point before I cooked them. I'll try again another day.
But as I cleaned up the spilled flour, eggs and granulated Splenda, all of which had hardened with all the water splashed around in the process of getting dishes and pots cleaned, I realized at least it was a good lesson as to why Quick-Clean Cuisine has become my way.
Oh, and the meringue turned out to be a thin layer of cooked foam over a tub of a flan-like crap that tasted like eggs sweetened with sugar. I don't recommend it.
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