Simple Chicken Noodle Soup

September 2020. My forty-second year of teaching begins, and for the first time in four decades, I will not set foot in a classroom. Everything is online. Everything is screens. I sit at the kitchen table with the laptop open and the students in their boxes and Marvin in his recliner behind me, sometimes visible in the frame, sometimes asleep, sometimes watching the screen with the puzzled interest of a man who cannot quite figure out why there are small faces in a rectangle on his wife's table.

I hate remote teaching. I hate it with the specific passion of a woman who believes that education happens in the space between bodies — in the room, in the air, in the moment when a student looks up from a page and something shifts in their face and you see it happen, the understanding arriving like sunrise, and you cannot see sunrise through a laptop. You can see pixels. Pixels are not sunrise.

But I adapt. Ruth Feldman does not quit. I read poetry aloud on Zoom and make my students turn their cameras on. Some comply. I consider this a victory. I assign Toni Morrison and watch their faces on the screen as I read aloud, and some of the faces are paying attention and some are not and I cannot reach through the screen to tap their desks and say "Listen" the way I can in a classroom, so I raise my voice and lower it and raise it again, using volume and silence the way a conductor uses a baton, and some of them listen, and some of them don't, and the ratio is worse than in person but not zero, and not zero is enough. Not zero is always enough.

At home — at home, where I already am, because home and school are the same place now — Marvin had a bad week. He forgot David's name. He looked at a photo of David on the shelf and said, "Who is this man?" and I said, "That's David. Your son." And he looked at the photo and looked at me and the connection did not fire, the circuit that connects "David" to "my son" to the man in the photograph was broken or rerouted or simply dark, and I put the photo down and made lunch and did not cry because I was due to teach in twenty minutes and I cannot teach while crying and I cannot cry while teaching and the two halves of my life — the teacher half and the caregiver half — are now occupying the same kitchen and neither will yield to the other.

I made chicken noodle soup. The simplest version. Because simplicity is all I have the energy for, and the soup is warm, and the noodles are soft, and Marvin ate it and said, "Good," and the word was enough. It is always enough.

That soup — the one I made after Marvin forgot David’s name, with twenty minutes before my next class and nothing left in me but the need to feed someone — is the recipe I’m sharing here. It is not fancy. It does not have fresh herbs or homemade stock or any of the flourishes I might have added in another year. It is chicken, noodles, broth, and a few vegetables, because that is what September 2020 allowed, and it was enough. It is always enough.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 35 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, diced
3 medium carrots, peeled and sliced into 1/4-inch rounds
3 stalks celery, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
8 cups low-sodium chicken broth
2 cups shredded cooked chicken (rotisserie works perfectly)
6 ounces wide egg noodles
1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice (optional)

Instructions

Cook the vegetables. Heat olive oil in a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat. Add the onion, carrots, and celery. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and stir for 30 seconds.
Add the broth. Pour in the chicken broth. Add the bay leaf, salt, and pepper. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat.
Cook the noodles. Once boiling, add the egg noodles. Reduce heat to medium and cook until the noodles are tender, about 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally so they don’t stick together.
Add the chicken. Stir in the shredded chicken and cook until heated through, about 3 minutes. Remove the bay leaf.
Season and serve. Taste the broth and adjust salt and pepper as needed. Stir in lemon juice if using. Ladle into bowls and serve warm.

Nutrition (per serving)

Simple Chicken Noodle Soup — The Only Recipe I Had the Energy For