Homestyle chicken noodle soup

Ingredients:

one chicken breast, cubed or shredded
one large carrot, diced
2-3 tablespoons green onion, chopped
2-3 large celery stalks, sliced
1/2 cup uncooked noodles of your choice
1 can chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste
pinch of oregano
pinch of thyme
1 tablespoon olive oil
water
saltine crackers (optional)

Steps:

Put chicken, carrot, celery and green onion in soup pan. Add salt, pour olive oil on top of ingredients, then stir-fry for 2-3 minutes. Don't worry if the chicken is still a little pink, because it will cook thoroughly in the next step.

Cover ingredients with water plus about 1/2 inch more water. Boil at high temperature for about 10 minutes, until the carrots and celery are nearly tender. Add more water, bring to boil, then add noodles. Cook until the noodles are soft. While the noodles are cooking, add salt, pepper, oregano and thyme.

Then add one can of chicken broth, and heat for another minute or until the soup begins to boil again.

Crush six saltine crackers into a soup bowl and pour the soup over them.

Experiment with ingredients. You may want to add two cans of chicken broth for a more watery soup, or you may want to double the entire recipe so you'll have leftovers. Bigger veggie chunks and thicker pasta will take longer to cook than smaller/thinner ones (of course), so cooking times will vary. I used a green pepper in my soup, but next time I won't. Also, I use olive oil for everything, but other oils will work just as well. I don't measure the oil either, I just use what seems reasonable to do the job. I had green onions on hand, but if I hadn't had them, I would have chopped a regular onion.

Enjoy on a nice fall day! I think it tastes way better than Campbell's (just takes a little more time to prepare).

Backstory:

A small can of Campbell's soup at the import grocery store costs $4. I can't afford that. I love Campbell's soup and would love nothing more than to eat it twice a day (saving my other meal for chips and salsa). But that's all rather impossible in my weird little world.

I can buy Swanson's chicken broth at the import store for about $3.50. That's pretty expensive for one little can of broth. Well, I do have other options. I could go down to the village market (inside the city), choose a live chicken, watch them put the live chicken in something that looks like a small electric clothes dryer to tumble and defeather it, then watch them break the horrified screaming chicken's neck. Then they would bag the chicken for me, head and feet and all, and I could bring the thing home and boil it to make my own chicken broth, all the while wondering if I touched something at the market that will give me the bird flu. That night -- and frankly for the next two decades -- I would have nightmares. Paying $3.50 for a can of Swanson's feels traumatic, but it feels like the least traumatic of the options. Wouldn't you agree?