Wintertime Comfort Food: Homemade Noodles

The weatherman promised us an El Nino winter this year. Mild temperatures and not much snow. And until February 2nd, he was right.

All through January, our weather was amazing. We even went hiking at Custer State Park and enjoyed our Black Hills car wash compliments of the local bison!

But on Groundhog Day, our weather changed. The El Nino in the Pacific had cooled down and our winter became wicked. Yours did, too! The Polar Vortex was fun, wasn't it? And since then we've had temperatures hovering around zero (except for an occasional warmer day between cold fronts.)

And the wind! We got about six inches of snow on Friday and Saturday, enough to cover everything with a beautiful frosty layer. Then Saturday night the wind picked up and the snow blew. Our front yard is down to bare grass, but there's a two-foot drift in the dog's pen.

When Mindy shared her chicken soup last week, I knew I had to make a batch. Hubby and I had both been fighting a cold bug, and chicken soup sounded perfect.

The only problem was that I didn't have Bohemian noodles on hand and neither of us wanted to get out in the weather and snow-covered roads to head over to Walmart to buy the noodles for our soup. But I had an alternate plan.

Homemade Noodles, Bohemian Style

ingredients:
2 cups flour
3 eggs
3 tablespoons water

The thing about noodles is that you can make them any way you like them, and the possibilities are endless - starting with the dough. This dough cooks up thick and puffy. I have another recipe from my grandmother that has only one egg to two cups of flour, and the noodles are much more flat. You can even make them with no eggs, but using flour, water, and olive oil instead.

Then when you add in the possible shapes...wow! Fat, thin, long, short. Filled with meat or cheese. Squares or ribbons, or even sheets. And don't forget tubes! Shells! Tortellini!

And the beauty is that all of these can be made in your kitchen with a bit of patience and a lot of practice. Missy even took a class on making pasta. Do you remember that blog post? Here's the link for a refresher.

Don't forget - I was making these noodles to use in the chicken soup recipe Mindy shared with us last week (here's that link - the soup was delicious!)

But even though the noodles Mindy used looked wonderful, I don't want a lot of pasta in my soup when I'm fighting a cold. I crave something much lighter. So I made itsy-bitsy thin noodles, almost like the ones you find in Lipton Instant Noodle Soup.

Enough talking! Let's make those noodles!

Mix the flour, eggs, and water in a medium sized bowl until well combined. Divide the dough into three mostly equal sized balls. Cover the bowl with plastic or with a plate, and let the dough rest in a warm place for 2 or 3 hours. The house was very cold the day I was making these, so I warmed up the oven to about 100° and let the bowl sit there.

I used my pasta machine to roll the dough. If you don't have one, or an attachment for your mixer, you'll have to do the rolling by hand. By the time you finish rolling out the dough, you'll be thinking your grandmothers were stalwart women!

For the thin noodles I wanted, I rolled the pasta to the next to the last setting - #5. After rolling out the dough, dust it with flour and let it dry for about 10-20 minutes. You want it to be almost - but not quite - dry for the next step. By the way, these two sheets of pasta are from one of the three balls of dough.

With a sharp knife, cut the almost dry sheet into strips. I wanted my noodles to be about 1 1/2 to 2 inches long, so that's how I determined the length of my strips.

Now to use the other side of the pasta machine to cut the noodles.

Run each strip through the machine one at a time, and let the cut noodles drop into a bowl. My pasta machine has two width settings, and I used the "spaghetti" width for these little noodles.

Dust the noodles with a small amount of flour as you go. When all the pasta strips are cut, lay the noodles out on a floured towel to finish drying.

I used about a third of the noodles in our soup on Thursday night and put the rest in a storage container. Over the weekend, I used them for a quick batch of chicken noodle soup for our lunch.

By the way, these thin noodles cook in only 2 or 3 minutes, so don't add them to your soup until you're almost ready to serve it!

Meanwhile, we dream of spring. I love winter, but by Valentine's Day, I start looking for the first signs of the changing season. Dripping water... Pasque flowers blooming... The first Robins returning... Migrating geese headed north...

*sigh* It isn't happening this week! Although by the middle of the week our temperatures are supposed to be in the mid-20's!

How is your part of the country faring? Are you still frozen in the depths of winter? Or is spring just around the corner?

One more thing!

My latest release is now available at Walmart and everywhere Love Inspired books are sold!

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