Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Chicken Noodle Hold the Soup. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.  The original recipe can be found over at The Rachael Ray Show

Robyn’s Take: This is our first reader-submitted recipe, sent to use by Nicole D!

I don’t know a whole lot about Rachael Ray except that she shills a $20 “garbage bowl”, and so help me if any of you buy a damn bowl ESPECIALLY to put your kitchen garbage in, I will come knock on your door and slap you into next Tuesday, because that is some ridiculous-ass shit. It always confuses me when a specialist – ie, a cook – gets a five-day-a-week show.

I mean, you’re a cook or a cardiothoracic surgeon (Dr. Oz, lookin’ at you), what on earth makes anyone think you need an ENTIRE show where you, I assume, do things other than cook or perform surgery? But I guess she’s had her show for several years now and it’s still going, so there you go. Speaking of Dr. Oz, is it just me or does that man recommend a HUGE number of supplements? If you took every supplement he recommended, you’d be eating nothing but supplements all day long. ANYway.

Your ingredients:

A chicken, removed from the bone and kind of shredded (the recipe called for a rotisserie chicken; we have a freezer full of chicken, so I cooked one in the crock pot and used that), peas, carrots, onion, celery, zucchini, egg noodles, olive oil, salt and pepper, and a bit of butter. The original recipe called for parsley, but I don’t do parsley so I left it out (the world would be a better place if parsley was left out of everything.)

Cook your egg noodles!

Put a large skillet over medium-high heat, and add your olive oil. Add the carrots, celery, and onion to the pan and cook until the veggies start to get tender, 3 – 4 minutes.

Add the zucchini and some salt and pepper to the pan, and cook for another couple of minutes, until all the veggies are tender.

This is the point when my noodles were done cooking, so I feel obligated to show you what noodles sitting in a colander look like.

Fascinating, no? I love the hell out of that colander; it’s made of silicone and it’s collapsible, so in theory it takes up less space. I mean, when I’m the one who puts it away, it takes up less space. The issue comes when Fred does the dishes. First he tries to take up half the damn dishwasher with that thing, and then when I yell at him for the fact that I’ll have to run the dishwasher with just that colander and two spoons and ask why he’s trying so hard to kill Mother Earth, he washes the colander and puts it away uncollapsed so it takes up the entire cabinet. When it’s collapsed it sits unobtrusively to the side, but when it’s not, it’s VERY FUCKING OBTRUSIVE. But I love it, so it’s staying.

Anyway. Add the chicken and peas to your pan of veggies, and let everything heat through.

Not shown: Adding butter to the noodles and tossing to coat. To serve, spoon chicken and veggie mixture over the noodles.

The verdict?

Really, just not impressive. It was okay, it wasn’t bad – we ate it for two meals and then Fred took the rest for leftovers – but it was pretty boring and bland. It could have used more spices (don’t try to tell me that it would have been better if I’d used the parsley. Parsley would have taken it from “meh” to inedible.) or maybe Rachael Ray in attendance to say “EVOO”, but all I know for sure is that I won’t be making this again.

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Nance’s Take:

Okay, I’m going to admit it. I cannot stand Rachael Ray. I remember watching her on the Food Network and she drove me nuts with her 30 minute meals. 30 minutes if you buy a bunch of pre-sliced and expensive ingredients! And the real truth on why I can’t stand her…I think she’s a fake-laugher. I cannot stand people who fake chuckle, giggle or laugh. Nobody should ever fake something in order to appear like they have charm. She does it all the time and if you don’t believe me, watch her closely. Fake laugher. Fake grin. Fake Smile. Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake!

Although I do believe her boobs are real.  See below.

You can’t possibly know how annoyed I was that I had to watch her cooking segment to get the gist of this recipe. Or it might have been to see how to “matchstick” vegetables correctly. Shut-up.

Rick picked up the rotisserie chicken for me since it was on his way home from work.  This came from Sam’s Club and we call it a Pickin’ Chicken because sometimes we’ll grab one of these and pick at it all day like a bunch of gross carnivores. Then I throw it in a big pot of water to get all of the meat off of it and make chicken and dumplings (the real kind).

This is what it looked like after having been in the refrigerator overnight. Um, gross.

I had no idea what flat-parsley is and it didn’t matter because when I went to the grocery store they only had Italian Parsley. Who knew there were so many different types of parsley out there? Not me, man.  Maybe there aren’t that many types.  Maybe there is just flat and Italian and I’m just stupid.  Hmm.

This is a carrot and vegetable peeler. I am not really good at peeling shit. When I have to peel potatoes (I avoid it like the plague) I use a knife and hack away at it.  I may lose some of the potato, but I’m okay with that. There is nothing more annoying than peeling the skin off of anything (Silence of the Lambs – WOOT). Okay, I just grossed myself out. We’re not going to talk about it anymore.

As you can see, I muddled through. The recipe is really simple to make (although not quite as simple as Rachael Ray made it seem). The biggest pain in the ass and time-suck for me was getting all of the vegetables peeled, cut, and thrown into the pan.

I salt and peppered the shit out of those vegetables. The recipe calls for cooking them 3-4 minutes, but I cooked the shit out of those bad boys because I don’t care for vegetables.  Zucchini? Get real.  I don’t need a crunch to tell me that I’m eating a vegetable.  I prefer mine to be cooked beyond recognition and then I’m all about them.  What?  At least they’re not deep-fried!

Decapitation brought to you by DCEP!  Shirley (aka: mom) cracked my shit up when I opened the refrigerator this morning and found the bottom half of that bunch in a plastic baggie.  She was cooking with me and either she has even less of a clue about parsley than I do or she was just on a roll cleaning up and not paying attention.  Either way, I got a chuckle out of it.  A real chuckle.  Not to be confused with a Rachael Ray chuckle.

I was in a hurry so I used one of Rick’s tricks to cook the noodles. You know how the instructions say to bring water to a boil and then add the noodles?  Rick just adds them right away.  I flip out every time I catch him doing it. But I was in a hurry so the noodles went into the pot and I was all, “Boil, goddammit, BOIL!”

Don’t tell Rick.

Action shot! Please Note: Those vegetables are seriously COOKED (and some of them even look like worms).

Noodles with chopped parsley. You don’t know how badly I just wanted to add a shit-ton of parmesan cheese and call that dinner.  But I soldiered on because I’m trying to be good about this bullshit recipe site with a weird name.  Sigh.

It was really very good.  And that’s saying something coming from a vegetable hater like myself.  It’s going into the rotation for sure.  Whoever picked this (I don’t pay attention, I figure Robyn will know) did a good job because it’s the first Rachael Ray recipe that has ever made it in to my recipe book!