Golden chicken noodle soup.

Plus a little note on perfection.

Ready to cook? Jump to the recipe.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Life has been keeping me busy (hello, move to a new city, and hello, little girl who turned us into a family of four!)

I stray from writing when life gets frenetic. And make no mistake: Life since having two kids is anything but relaxed. It’s chaotic. And messy. And exhausting. But it’s also breathtaking, beautiful, and impossibly mundane.

Since becoming a mother, I’m not the me I used to be. I feel things deeper—the happiness and pride and love when I think about my little girls billows in my chest. Sometimes I look down to see if I’m as puffed up as I feel. The highs are so incredibly high. And oh my, the lows. Memories from my own childhood have sneakily come out from under the cracks and are present in a way that they weren’t before. The weight I feel on my shoulders to be the mother I always wanted is crushing.

My oldest is 3 now, and my littlest about to turn 1, and my what a journey the past three years have been.

Lately, I’ve been pushing away that heavy weight and asking myself: What does it mean to be a good mom? It’s taken me a while to realize it, but for me, it manifested in a constant attempt to reach perfection. Homemade meals, a woman who doesn’t raise her voice or lose her temper, an organized, clean house, a mom and dad who never fight, smiles, laughter, cookie boxes at Christmastime, and happy memories that I’m in charge of crafting.

The more I reached, the harder I failed. The more I tried to cram in a day, the worse I felt. The harder I tried to be the mom I never had, the bigger the disappointment.

Because here’s the thing about chasing perfection: We’re never going to be perfect anything. Not a perfect wife, not a perfect mother, not a perfect person. I’m flawed—beautifully, horribly, humanly flawed. Just like everybody else.

So instead of feeling disappointed because I’m failing, I’m trying to embrace the flaws. The same flaws everyone has. That my kids will surely have, too. I’m embracing the fact that I’m not perfect, and offering myself some compassion on the days I pull out premade baby food for my littlest or raise my voice when I’m at my wits’ end.

Because when I close my eyes and think about what I want my little girls to see when they look up at me, there are two options.

A mom who’s spread thin, who stresses the small things, and who measures her success by the number of homemade meals and perfectly folded loads of laundry. Or there’s a mother who understands it’s okay to prioritize herself, who knows it’s okay to yell, who understands and wholeheartedly embraces the fact she is who she is, and she deserves to be loved, flaws and all, too.

I hope my girls have that same compassion for themselves, too. And I hope they don’t have to search too far for it either.

Anyway, all of this is to say is that I’ve been thinking about perfection a lot these days. And I think it’s time we say to hell with it.

This is my motherhood era. I don’t have the space to strive for perfection, and I don’t want to anymore. I want to soak up these moments—the sleepless nights, my little shadows following me all around the house, the handprint-stained windows, the tiny little toys I find in my shoes in the morning. I know we won’t be in this phase forever, and that thought stops me in my tracks. I want to look back and remember the mess, the joy, the tears, the hardships, the toddler belly laughs. The mother who loved her kids fiercely, not the one striving for something she could never attain in the first place.

So somedays, I pull out premade baby food. Somedays, the laundry sits in the dirty clothes basket. Somedays, I go to bed with toys strewn about the living room and dirty dishes in the sink. Somedays I snap, I apologize, we move on. Somedays, I need a break, and I ask our babysitter take the girls to the park for a few hours.

And other days, I could spend hours with my girls, chasing them around our living room, putting puzzles together, painting little masterpieces that we leave strewn out all over the coffee table to dry. Other days, I sneak into the kitchen for some me time, and I make homemade chicken noodle soup for my family.

And that is what I’m writing about today. This chicken noodle soup has completely won my family over this winter. I make it on a weekly basis at this point, and I leave a big batch of the base (no noodles) in the fridge to fuel us for the week. It’s mostly hands-off, and thanks to the heavy-handed dose of carrots and slightly browned celery and onions in the first step, the finished broth takes on a beautiful golden hue. My husband and I make it with thick, chewy egg noodles, and my girls gobble it up with tiny little star pasta.

I hope your family loves this one as much as mine does. Here’s to letting go of perfection, embracing the chaos, and when your week allows for it, a big batch of homemade golden chicken noodle soup.

Golden chicken noodle soup

Yields: 4-6 bowls of soup (In my house, it comes to four adult servings + and two little human servings)

Ingredients:
2 Tablespoons olive oil, divided
1 onion, roughly chopped (1 1/4 cup)
2-3 carrots, roughly chopped (about 1 cup)
1 celery stalk, roughly chopped (1/3 cup)
3 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed
500 grams (1 pound) of skinless, bone-in chicken thighs
Salt and pepper
Water
Egg noodles

Instructions:
1. Add one tablespoon of olive oil to a large pot, and turn the burner up to medium high. Plae your palm an inch above the bottom of the pot to see if the oil is warm. Once you feel the heat hit your hand, add the chopped onion, carrots, and celery to the pot. Season with a teaspoon of salt and 20 twists from your pepper mill, and give the vegetables a big stir to coat everything in the oil.
2. Lower the stove to medium-low, and let the veggies cook until they just start to catch a bit of color; you’re looking for a golden hue, not browned, and definitely not burn, about 10-15 minutes.
3. Once the veggies have some color, push them out of the center of the pot to make some room for the chicken. Add the remaining tablespoon of olive oil to the center of the pot.
4. Season the chicken thighs with salt and pepper on both sides, and add them to the pot with warm oil.
5. Cook the chicken on each side for about 3-4 minutes, just until it starts to get a bit of color.
6. Add 8 cups of water to the pot, along with a nice pinch of salt and a few more cracks of pepper. Give everything a big stir, and ensure the chicken is completely covered by the water.
7. Bring the pot of veggies and chicken to a boil, before lowering the heat to medium and letting it softly simmer and cook the chicken for the next 45 minutes or so.
8. At the 45-minute mark, test your chicken. It should be so tender that it’s falling off the bone. If not, continue cooking the soup at a low boil until the chicken is tender.
9. Once fall-off-the-bone tender, remove the chicken thighs and transfer to a cutting board. Let the chicken cool briefly, and once you’re able to handle it with your hands, finely chop the chicken. (This is a personal preference; I preferred chopped chicken over shreed any day, but if you prefer, the chicken could easily be shredded at this point.)
10. Before adding the chicken back to the pot, take an immersion blender to blend the (newly created) chicken broth and veggies. This soup has the most success in my house if there are no pieces of veggies to be found anywhere, but if you prefer to have whole veggies in yours, you could certainly skip this step!
11. If you’ve blended the soup and the mixture feels too thick (i.e., it looks more like a puree than a broth), add 1/2 cup of water at a time, until you reach a broth-like consistency. Taste your broth at this point, and season with salt and pepper if necessary. (We’ve added salt at every step along the way, so there shouldn’t bee too much of correction here, but always best to taste test to be sure.)
12. Add your chopped or shredded chicken back to the pot, et voilé, you have a beautiful chicken noodle soup base. At this point, you can add noodles* to prepare a whole pot of chiken noodle soup, or you can do what I do most weeks, and store this chicken noodle soup base in the fridge. Then, whenever the craving hits, you ladle a few servings into a smaller pot, add a handful of noodles, and in less than 10 minutes, you’ve got a piping hot bowl of homemade soup in front of you.

* Egg noodles in chicken noodle soup, always and forever.