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Our cool evenings are coming to an end so I’m trying to squeeze in as many cold-night dinners as I can. A family favorite is this chicken noodle soup — with dumplings! It may seem like overkill to have both noodles and dumplings, but it’s delicious. You can easily leave out one or the other if you like.

This is very versatile as well. You can easily substitute the raw chicken for cooked leftovers (roast chicken works perfectly).

Or you can make the soup in the crockpot, and do the dumplings separately on the stove: Pour about an inch of chicken broth into a shallow pan and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to simmer, and drop your dumplings in, and cover. Let cook for a few minutes and then serve with the chicken soup out of the crockpot.

I have made dumplings in the crockpot, but it took forever. Doing it separately on the stove is much faster.

Chicken Noodle Soup with Dumplings

1 lb chicken, cut into 1/2 to 1 inch cubes
1 Tb oil
2 Tb butter
1 potato, peeled and diced into small pieces
2 carrots, peeled and diced into small pieces
1 onion, chopped
1 bay leaf
1 tsp poultry seasoning
2 Tb flour
6 cups chicken broth

2 cups egg noodles
1 cup frozen peas

2 cups biscuit mix
1 tsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder
2 tsp dried parsley

Add oil and butter to large pot over medium heat. Add potatoes, carrots, onion and bay leaf and cook for five minutes, stirring often. Season with salt and pepper, and add poultry seasoning. Add flour and cook for two minutes, and then stir in broth and bring to a boil. Add chicken and stir, cooking for about five minutes. Add egg noodles and stir.

Combine biscuit mix with salt, garlic powder and parsley, and add about 1 cup of warm water (you don’t want it too wet or too dry, so you may need to adjust with a little more mix or a little more water). Using two large tablespoons, scoop out a spoonful and drop gently into the pot. I usually get about six dumplings. Cover the pot and reduce heat to simmer, steaming the dumplings for about 10 minutes. Remove the lid, remove the pan from the heat and add the peas.

I would usually serve soup with a yummy homemade bread, but there are enough carbs in this soup on its own!

One of my bigger annoyances in the kitchen is my recipes getting messed up because I have nowhere to put them while I’m cooking. I usually just lay them on the counter, and they end up covered or splattered in whatever it is I’m trying to make. Yuck.

I came up with this idea after working on a particularly involved recipe that required a ton of ingredients which ended up burying the recipe itself, making it difficult to keep track of.

I needed to get the recipe up and out of the way, and though my original idea was to just Scotch tape it to the cupboard, I knew I had to come up with something a little less wasteful and a little more permanent.

Enter the magnet!

I used some regular packing tape (Scotch tape wasn’t strong enough) to stick a fairly powerful magnet to the inside of the cupboard door. You’re going to need a magnet that can shoot its magical magnet vibes through the thickness of your door, so you might need to experiment with what you’ve got.

I used packing tape because it’ll keep the magnet in place but I didn’t want to damage the door with anything too permanent like glue (the tape comes right off when I need it to).

You’ll need a second magnet for the outside of the door to hold the recipe up. I got these cute push pin magnets from Think Geek.

When the magnet isn’t in use holding up a recipe, simply stick it on the magnet inside the cupboard, close the door, and no one’s the wiser.

[originally posted at pinspired.org]

(I <3 elephants!)