Plain old comfort food, quite literally the way my mom used to make it.
Remove the skin from a couple of bone-in chicken breasts and simmer with water to cover, perhaps with a carrot, celery stalk, and halved onion thrown into the pot, until cooked through. Remove solids. Discard vegetables. Remove chicken meat from bones, chop coarsely, and set aside.
Add to cooking liquid: one or two thinly sliced carrots and one or two sliced celery stalks. Bring to a boil and simmer a couple of minutes. Add salt to taste and about half a package of wide egg noodles. There should be barely enough liquid to cover the noodles. Add water if it seems far too dry; but the idea is for the noodles to absorb most of the liquid. It's not chicken noodle soup.
Cook on low, stirring frequently to prevent burning, until noodles and vegetables are cooked and most of the liquid is absorbed. Return meat to pot and heat through. Season to taste.
Nothing fancy, but it is nice, especially the next day after the noodles have released some of their starch and thickened the broth.
One thing I love about chicken soup: You can simmer poultry scraps and bones and vegetables for seventy-two hours and get a wonderfully rich, concentrated, brown chicken stock that's fabulous in recipes. Or you can simmer some chicken parts for one hour, with a couple of carrots thrown in, and you still get some very tasty broth. I think that the one-hour broth tastes completely different from the seventy-two-hour broth, a lovely flavor on its own and a fine soup base. Not that it isn't worth the trouble to let the stuff go for a few days --- it's just that you can start making something nice by dipping into it right away.
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