Mom's Divine Noodles

"Would it be weird if I said I wanted noodles again?"

We had cooked homemade noodles on Monday and ate leftovers on Tuesday, so of course Julie and I quickly replied in unison, "Not at all."

Normally we eschew "carbs," and any time we have flour and mixing bowls, quick-clean cuisine doesn't come readily to mind, but we love homemade noodles, even when they don't turn out as good as the ones my mother used to make.

We'd been flouting Dr. Atkins for the week anyway, so what was one more high carb meal?  Well, make that two more, if you count leftovers, and since Amy was flying out Saturday morning, she ate noodles for breakfast the next day.

This is the third time I have written about homemade noodles in this blog, so you may rightly ask why write about them again?

The answer is simple.

This time they turned out perfectly.

So perfect, in fact, that I wonder if we had a bit of divine help.

Do I sense you scoffing at the idea?

Let me give you a little background.

If you never met my mother, you should know she was one of the most loving, thoughtful, sweet, kind, generous and helpful people who ever lived.  When she made her transition to pure spirit five years ago, we were all deeply saddened, but we also had no doubt that she would have eternal life with eternal rewards. 

Five months later, Amy and I were driving through our neighborhood in my Ford Escape, when a GM Yukon XL, a true monster of an SUV, blew through a stop sign and broadsided us.  We were immediately spinning through the air.

We landed on the opposite side of the street next to the curb, thrown thirty feet in the direction the Yukon was heading and moving only a car length forward.

The side of the Escape was caved in, and both axels broken, but miraculously, Amy and I walked away from what could have easily been a fatal accident.

Could that have been my mom intervening, or possibly she and my late dad, whose birthday was around that time?

We were rather calm, even when the other driver, who seemed irate with no care that she had nearly killed us, got out demanding to know if we had stopped for our stop sign.  Rather than going off on her, I pointed out that we didn't have a stop sign, which made her burst into tears of remorse. 

Flash forward to Friday, when we took out the mixing bowl and began preparing noodles once more.

After our last effort, Julie said she thought the recipe might be 1 egg to 1 cup of flour, so I poured flour into a measuring cup.  This was the end of the flour in the canister, and before adding a new bag, I thought I might as well put the rest in the noodles, bringing it to two heaping cups of flour, which I poured into the mixing bowl.

Amy whisked two eggs in a measuring cup and added them to the flour, with a pinch of salt.  As she mixed those together with a spoon, I rinsed out the measuring cup and put a tablespoon of butter in it.  I microwaved the butter for 22 seconds and poured that into Amy's mixing bowl.  I added a half cup of low fat milk to the bowl, and Amy continued mixing them by hand until it was a big ball of dough.

I dusted a piece of parchment paper with flour, and Amy put the ball on it.  I pressed it as flat as I could get it by hand, and then Amy rolled it out with the trusty heavy Guinness glass.

We then left the noodles out to dry as we walked over to the Portofino Hotel for a happy hour drink at Balleen, which was something we had on the to-do list while Amy was here.  I don't remember exactly why, but somehow the fact that green peas were among my favorite vegetables as a child found its way into the conversation.  I said that I remembered my mom and grandmother sitting on the back porch of my grandparents' old farmhouse shucking freshly picked peapods on hot summer days in preparation for dinner.

When we returned home, we boiled two boneless, skinless chicken breasts with a tablespoon of minced onions in a Teflon pot over medium heat for 35 minutes, and then took them out to cut into smaller pieces.

I tried to find Cream of Chicken Soup in the cupboard, but there was none left, so we used Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup instead.  We stirred in the mushroom soup and a cup of low fat milk.  This time, we added no salt of any kind.

We chopped up celery, but Julie suggested using peas instead of carrots this time.  Because peas are definitely high in sugar, this was a surprising suggestion by the queen of low carb herself.  I looked in the freezer to see if we had any, and there was only a partial bag of C & W Petite Peas there.  We added them, and lo and behold, it looked to be just the right amount of peas.

It was at this point that it occurred to me that exactly what was on hand resulted in three of the choices: the amounts of both flour and peas as well as the choice of mushroom soup over chicken soup. 

After adding the celery, we mixed it and let it simmer awhile.  I mistakenly left the cover on the pot, which resulted in soup overflowing and making a mess, but we had a team clean up effort that saved the stove from extensive damage and then returned the soup to simmer.

We separately heated the water with a mandatory teaspoon of salt in the pasta pan, adding the noodles when it reached a full boil.  After it returned to a boil, we cooked them for three minutes.  Our sampling confirmed in the minds of all three of us that the noodles had turned out perfect, so Julie carefully added them to the soup to avoid undue mess on the stove or countertop.  We let it all cook together for a few more minutes.

Now that is exactly how to make Homemade German Egg Noodles....well, except the boiling all over the stove part.

Third time is a charm.

By the way, if you clean up as you go rather than just piling stuff in the sink, this really doesn't require that much extra clean up, and it is well worth the effort.