making the midnight noodles

When my grandparents first got married, my Great-Grandma Ethel taught Gram how to make noodles. Grandma Ethel had many talents, but I suspect that "domestic goddess" wasn't a title she really coveted, so she passed her noodle-making knowledge down to Gram (her daughter-in-law) and dusted the metaphorical (and probably literal!) flour off her hands. So every year, for every holiday, Gram would make noodles with chicken served over mashed potatoes. To call it "chicken and noodles" doesn't do it justice: It's not a soup, and the chicken isn't the star. In my family, the dish has always just been called "the noodles" or, as Grandpa calls them, "the midnight noodles," because Gram never had time to make them until late on the holiday eve.

I was the kind of kid (and am now the kind of adult) who was always asking questions: How do you do that? Why do you do it that way? How did you learn it? Can I do it too? And one year, I asked Gram how to make the noodles, and she decided to teach me. We sat at the kitchen table in the evening, and she poured a hillock of flour directly onto the table. Then she carved out a crater and showed me how to separate eggs and drop the yolks in. And then we kneaded, and kneaded, and kneaded. And she got out the rolling pin and taught me how to roll the dough out from the center and lay it out to dry. Later, she showed me how to roll the dough up and cut it with a knife — though not lengthwise, the way my uncle Steve did one year in a misguided attempt at helpfulness, making a thick doughy mess.

And now that she's gone, I'm the one who makes the noodles for the holidays, and every time I'm at once incredibly happy to have this little part of her, and indescribably sad, along with a healthy dose of sick panic that I will forget how to make them the right way and we will all have a noodle-free holiday. Thankfully, that hasn't happened (yet). I do some things differently than she did. Case in point: I don't mess around with boiling a whole chicken for the broth, because I'd probably end up getting somebody hurt by leaving in too many bones and it just seems like so much more work than using breast fillets. And after a few holidays where I spent days picking the dried flour and eggs out from under my fingernails, I got the bright idea to start using the dough hook on my stand mixer. (Why did none of us ever think to get her a stand mixer??) And this year, I'm even making them a couple of days early (though I won't cook them until Christmas), something Gram said she always meant to do but somehow never found the time for. So today, I'm making noodles, and thinking about Gram, and hoping that one day, one of the boys or one of my siblings or cousins or aunts or uncles (hah!) will stop to ask me: How do you do that? How did you learn it? Can I do it too? And I will be happy to show them. After all, it's a (really) big family, and I don't think we could ever have too many noodles.

UPDATE: Avalon decided to try her hand at making a dough ball (though I still rolled it out for her since I was covered in flour and she wasn't). Not bad for a first attempt!