Chicken and dumplings, Pennsylvania Dutch style

Found this. I don't know why I'd bother making noodles with whole wheat flour in it. They're always too fragile. I know better.

And the whole time I thinking, wow, this is really good. I wonder why these things don't occur to me now. Just get a chicken and do this. Even Tony's right down the street, how simple, I could bring one home, I can't go wrong. They have the best chicken of all. It's always good. Mum would place the whole chicken in boiling water and let it go until it falls away from the bone then vegetables and fat broad egg noodles go in, their conceptualization of dumplings.

Why she didn't roast the chicken to concentrate instead of dilute flavor I don't know, and why she didn't then roast the bones for double Maillard insistence I do not know, except perhaps that she just didn't know.

And they had the best chickens back then too. It wasn't the gargantuan battery chicken operations of today, rather, it was more personally knowing the farmers or having live chickens yourself. Those kinds of chicken running around all over the place taste much more gamey, more like pheasant, where modern chicken are blank slates.

The chicken down the street at Tony's are the same as the chickens up the other street a few more blocks at Whole Foods, still large production, more carefully cared for and that translates to tastier chicken and much better, significantly and noticeably better broth. More like the old days. The very old days. A dish like this, when roasted, is where those whole chickens shine.

One thinks of adding wine for depth, sophistication and warmth.  With a hearty chicken like that, even red wine, and boom, now we're in coq au vin territory, the same idea using chicken as beef bourguignon.