The Lady's Chicken Noodle Soup

My husband sometimes likes to welcome the first warmer winter day with a cold, so he was naturally craving some chicken noodle soup this evening. I could have just made a trip to the grocery store and picked up some canned soup, but if I have the time, I'm not about to take the easy way out. So, I did some recipe searching on Food Network's site and found a five-star rated recipe: Paula Deen's The Lady's Chicken Noodle Soup.

This was an easy soup, and far superior to the canned kind. I opted to "Paula Deen it up" by adding the heavy cream and Parmesan cheese, but it was just as tasty without. Adding the dairy, though, made a thick, almost stroganoff-like consistency. Don't expect a runny soup from this one.

A bonus to making this recipe was learning how to make a chicken stock relatively from scratch, something I've always been a bit intimidated to do up until now. The stock, however, was a cinch. I used two packages of split chicken breasts since I couldn't find any fryer chickens, halving each piece before adding to the soup pot.  I also added a bit more noodles and about twice the amount of mushrooms (because we're big mushroom fans).

I just served with a crusty multi-grain bread, and it was the perfect cold-weather meal.