Sunday 15 September 2013

Using up bits and bobs...

I have had 2 boned chicken thighs languishing in the freezer so defrost them and worked out a recipe. With hindsight, it was a little too much. We did enjoy it though, so reckon for us, we could get away with just one chicken thigh and only one nest of dried noodles! You may need both depending on your appetite.

Here are the base ingredients: 2 chicken thighs cut into strips, 1/2 an onion, 2 rashers of streaky bacon - chopped, plus a few lettuce leaves for later.
10 baby tomatoes - halved, 6 tomatillo's - halved (you could use extra tomatoes) and 1 medium, thinly sliced carrot - using a vegetable peeler.
Plus either 1/2 a stock cube (we used a dessert-spoon of home made vegetable stock paste from the freezer), in 3/4 a cup of noodle water,  a few good dashes of soya sauce, lots of black pepper.

Everything on the wooden board, except the lettuce, was gently fried to cook and soften. Then the items off the plate were added along with the stock cube, water and soya. 2 nests of fine dried noodles were also simmering in a pan of water and it is this water that we used for the sauce, rather than fresh. As the sauce cooked and slowly evaporated, the lettuce leaves were shredded and scattered into it.

The meat and vegetables in their sauce, were then poured on top of the strained noodles.
We really enjoyed it. If you find it a little bland for your taste, you can add some chilli sauce or Worcestershire sauce before serving. We found the addition of the home made vegetable paste though, gave it a lovely light taste.

7 comments:

  1. Looks good, amazing what you can make with just a little meat and some extra ingredients. I splash Worcestershire sauce in most things. Weird to think its made from anchovies! I made some unusual things last week as we had nothin left and noodles would have been great. Thanks for sharing. X

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    1. I challenge myself all the time with meat. It not only keeps the meat bill down, but also uses up every scrap. Sometimes, we use the saving on a joint of meat. Just bought half a leg of lamb from a farm shop on our way back from a few days away. That hopefully will do us loads of meals including soup. Do you use your chicken carcass or bones for soup? You can get loads of meat off them and makes oodles of soup. I went to our butchers a few months back and asked for some beef bones. Roasted them and apart from using them in soup, got enough lovely tasting fat for several batches of roast beef potatoes!

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  2. Your Chicken Noodles look lovely, I have to admit I never buy chicken on the bone except for a whole chicken, if I need chicken pieces its usually breasts and I know that the legs and thighs are much tastier in a casserole and so much cheaper. I really should get my act together and buy some. Its lovely when you have a local butcher who will supply bones, I wish I lived nearer a friend who's partner is a butcher lol, my daughter in law makes all his Christmas Puddings for his shop and he pays her with meat as well as supplying all the ingredients. At home we always had a dripping bowl, if it was fresh pork dripping we spread it on thick slices of bread with lots of salt..yum... not something we would do nowadays!!

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    1. I buy them with bones in and skin on and do them myself. That is about my limit for boning! That way, they are usually cheaper, the bones and skin can be boiled for soup (same as chicken wings which I don't bone!) We were quite poor as children and lived (not all the time) on dripping and bread, and/or black pudding. Dinner was sometimes porridge with cornflakes stirred in.

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  3. My favorite kinds of meals are bits and bobs of this and that. Looks great!

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    1. I enjoy the challenge of it, most of the time, it works out okay.

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  4. This looks really tasty DC. I always try to use things up that are left over in the fridge. I didn't used to but am learning to be frugal. Funnily enough I'm just about to write about my weekend joint leftovers. Have a good week.
    Patricia x

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