Making Chicken and Noodles with our Rooster

We recently processed our very first chicken, one of our roosters. It was an interesting process, one I hope we will repeat. It's quite a skill!

Now it's time to eat the little guy.

I cooked him for probably 4 hours, then stripped all the meat I could off the bones. Believe me, there wasn't much. Thankfully chicken and noodles doesn't require a lot of meat.

Next I made noodles! I use my bread machine's egg noodle recipe. I just add the ingredients and wait 20 minutes for to mix and knead the dough, and then wait 30 minutes for the dough to rest.

After letting the dough rest, I cut it into four parts. I knead one part and flatten it with my hands.

For Christmas a few years ago, my husband bought me the pasta attachments for my KitchenAid stand mixer. I love them.

So like I said, I flatten one of the dough balls with my hands. I then begin to feed it through the rollers to flatten it. It takes 4 passes, each on a different thickness setting, to get it flat enough to run through the noodle cutter.

I cut the noodles using the linguine cutter. There is also a spaghetti cutter but that is too fine for what I'm doing.

I cut all the dough into noodles and then let the noodles rest on my pasta rack until I am ready to use them. You can freeze them for later use, but I've never tried.

Those are some sexy noodles!

I got my chicken meat and broth boiling good and slowly add the noodles.

I add a little cornstarch and eventually the whole mixture thickens.

And I'm done! Time to feed the troops!

We didn't tell the kids we were eating one of the chickens...until after. They didn't seem to mind and said it was really tasty. So it looks like we will definitely be processing more of our chickens as the time comes. I felt really good about making this meal knowing it wasn't full of preservatives or nasty chemicals. It was really delicious!

Thanks for checking this post out! Hope you're staying warm and cozy!