Lauren's Organic Chicken Noodle Soup (+recipe)

A few days ago I attempted to post my chicken noodle soup recipe, but blogger was making me mad and was putting the picture wherever it felt like putting it! So I finally gave up, but then it posted anyway...yeah, it was fun times with blogger! :)

Anyway....so my husband had the flu last week so I decided that I wanted to make chicken noodle soup from (mostly) scratch because there is nothing better than chicken noodle soup when you're sick.

I didn't really use a recipe, aside from the basic concepts of chicken noodle soup: chicken, chicken broth, carrots, celery and salt/pepper.

However, I made two little adjustments and I think that the finished product was even more tasty. Not quite to the level of taco chicken soup I made a few years ago with leftover taco chicken and homemade (yes, you read that right HOMEMADE noodles), but it was still quite tasty.

Adjustment number 1: Use organic!

Adjustment number 2: Curt's Cooking Spice!

And now, Lauren's Organic Chicken Noodle Soup. Apologies in advance as this is the first recipe I've ever written. :)

Five 14oz cans of Swanson's Chicken Broth.

1.5-2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts (I used Trader Joe's).

2-2.5 cups uncooked Trader Joe's Organic Fusilli Pasta.

3-4 large organic carrots

5-6 large organic celery hearts

sea salt and freshly ground pepper to taste (can use just regular salt & pepper too, but it won't taste as good!) :)

Curt's Cookie Spice to taste.

Bring medium sized pot of water to boil and add chicken. Boil chicken for 20 minutes. You may have to boil the chicken half at a time. Remove chicken from water and shred with two forks. General chicken shredding instructions here.

Slice up carrots and celery as desired. Set aside.

Add chicken broth to a large pot and simmer until chicken is fully shredded. After chicken is shredded, add the chicken to the broth and continue to simmer. I also added about 14oz of water to the broth even though it said "do not add water." It gave more broth, but I didn't find it to be any less flavorful.

Bring medium sized pot of water to boil and add noodles. Cook noodles about half-way, drain.

Add noodles and vegetables to chicken and chicken broth, turn up the heat. Add salt, pepper and Curt's to taste.

Once spices are added as desired, cover pot, and turn heat on high for 5-7 minutes.

Turn heat back down to simmer, uncover and eat.

As one can imagine, this soup was not very high in calories or fat (a little high in sodium though).

Chicken broth = 10 calories per half can, 20 calories per can x 5 cans = 100 calories.

Carrots = according to this website, 100g of carrots have 43-48 calories. I had a hard time figuring out how many carrots is 100g...I'm guessing that the 3 carrots I used would be about 150 calories?

Celery = according to this website, 110g of celery has 18 calories. I'll go out on a limb and guess that I had about 60 calories of celery.

Fusilli Pasta = per the bag, 3/4 of a cup has 210 calories. I'm going to guess I used about 2 cups, so that's approx 500 calories or so of pasta.

Chicken breast = I had a hard time finding a definitive calorie count for chicken breasts, and the package is long gone. Generally, 8oz of chicken breast = 250 calories. I used about 32 oz of chicken breast so roughly 1000 calories.

Salt, Pepper and Curt's = 0 calories.

So for the whole, huge pot of chicken noodle soup, we're looking at 1800 calories. This sucker had about 8 servings in it, so per serving we are looking at 225 calories per bowl. Not bad!

There are different ways to add fewer calories. Add more veggies, less chicken. Add less pasta, or take a whole wheat pasta with fewer calories and more fiber. Use egg noodles, they are bigger and take up more space, so you can use less. You could also substitute rice for pasta. The possibilities are endless!

My next quest is to try and reproduce that taco chicken soup- probably won't make the noodles from scratch again though.