What to do with leftover chicken and turkey: hot and numbing chicken salad recipe

November 18, 2012November 18, 20121 Comment

If you feel like you need an unusual recipe for leftover turkey this Thanksgiving or Christmas, look no further! This recipe is from the excellent Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop, which has about four or five easy and tasty recipes for cooked chicken at the front. This hot and numbing chicken mixes spicy chilli oil and toasted, ground sichuan pepper together with soy sauce and sugar to create a really delicious cold dish.

INGREDIENTS

300g left over cold cooked turkey or chicken, white or dark meat
Bunch spring onions
4 tsp granulated sugar
2 tbsp light soy sauce
2-4 tbsp chilli oil (depending on how spicy you like it – best to start small and add more later!)
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp Sichuan peppercorns
Cucumber, to serve

METHOD

Dry roast the peppercorns in a frying pan, then grind them to produce 1/2 tsp of ground spice.
Cut the chicken in slices, and cut the cucumber and spring onions into elegant diagonals.
Create the dressing by dissolving the sugar in the soy sauce, then adding in the chilli and sesame seed oil.
Arrange the chicken and spring onions on a plate, then sprinkle over the Sichuan pepper.
Drizzle over the sauce, and tuck in!

Serve with salad, or white rice.

What to do with leftover chicken and turkey: red Thai curry

November 18, 2012November 18, 20121 Comment

The best leftover recipes don’t taste like leftovers. This recipe totally exceeded my expectations. I think the secret is poaching the chicken at the end very gently just to warm through. It actually tastes better than the curry I make from raw chicken, as the meat is very soft.

Ingredients

1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 inch ginger
2 cloves garlic
1.5 tbsp red Thai curry paste
Can of coconut milk
2 lime leaves
1 stick dried lemongrass
1/2 tbsp fish sauce
1/2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp sugar
Leftover chicken

Method

Finely chop the ginger and garlic.
Heat the oil in a frying pan and add the garlic and ginger. Fry for a couple of seconds and then add the Thai curry paste.
Allow to cook for about a minute, then add the rest of the ingredients except the chicken.
Allow to simmer for 20 minutes until the texture is slightly thicker.
Dice or shred the chicken, then add to the curry and poach on a simmer for five minutes.
Serve with Thai jasmine rice.

Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic

September 28, 2009November 18, 20124 Comments

This recipe is one I’ve cooked before, but I wanted to cook it again, partly because it’s good and partly because I wanted to blog about it. I can’t remember the first time I heard about it, but I was definitely in my teens. I also have a copy of French chef Camille le Foll’s book Les Classiques de Camille (available in English as well) with a recipe for it. So I was totally aghast when I was watching an old episode of Nigel Slater’s Real Food (complete with a very young looking Nigella Lawson) with him and a bunch of snobby foodies (one of them was Alastair Little) talking about the dish as though it was a totally bizarre urban legend. You can actually watch the episode here, and they start talking about ‘the myth’ around 11 minutes on. Alastair Little said he never heard of it, so proceeded to make up a version. I’d love to be so smug as to think that just because I’d never heard of a recipe, it must be made up. Maybe one day.

Needless to say, I think Alastair Little is a ponce. Very good at cooking, but every time I see him on TV, I wish I hadn’t.

Anyway, I had heard of chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, and I’ve cooked it, and it is nice. So I thought I’d cook it again. Here’s the costing.

Wallace Red Freedom Endorsed chicken : £4.73
Fresh parsley : £1.19
Bunch sage : from garden
Thyme : £1.19
Rosemary : from garden
Bay leaf : from garden
150ml olive oil : store cupboard
3 bulbs garlic : 89p

Grand total : £8.00 exactly. Spooky. And, shameful, because I grow all these herbs in my garden, but they are sort of dwarf, mini versions I dare not pick any leaves from, in case they die…

So here’s the chicken – no specific type needed, so I thought I’d get this Freedom Endorsed chicken from Sainsbury’s which was on special offer. Sorted.

Next step was to separate out the cloves of garlic – no peeling needed, thank goodness. If you ever wondered what 40 cloves of garlic looked like, this is for you.

Surprisingly few, right?

But still, so good looking. Ah, garlic…

Anything that starts with garlic, herbs and olive oil has to turn out good, right?

Chop a sprig of parsley, sage, thyme and rosemary and sprinkle it over the chicken together with salt and pepper, and cover with the olive oil. A lot of olive oil. Then, pop the bay leaf inside the chicken, and scatter the garlic around the edges.

Then you roast it for an hour and half, either covered with foil or a lid.

Once you take it out, the garlic should be delicious and soft, and you can squeeze it out of its skin… and eat it! Yum. Or spread it on the delicious chicken meat.

Serve it with crusty bread and a green salad. I also made roasted cherry tomatoes from the garden, sprinkled with a little sugar, dried thyme, salt and olive oil.

So, what’s the verdict? Was it too garlicy…?

No such thing.

The scores.

M gave it 8. He likes garlic.

I gave it 8.5. I like garlic too. And, it’s a quick and easy recipe, unusual and very delicious! If you like garlic… you will love this.

Kinda Spanish tapas

September 8, 2009November 18, 2012Leave a comment

Cooking a chicken every week and just throwing all the extra away would be easy. EASY, I tell you. But, it’s slightly harder to keep coming up with new ideas for leftover chicken (what, it’s week two and you’re complaining already?). To be honest, one of the main things I hope to take away from this little project is the ability to whip up delicious meals from leftover chicken in any circumstances. Climbing a mountain, checking out new clothes at West Quay, reading a book – no matter what I’m doing, in under a year’s time, if someone hands me a chicken carcass, I’ll be able to make faster than light movements, as if casting some magical spell, then produce a delightful meal that no one will even be able to tell is leftovers.

This did not happen this time.

In fact, this isn’t even chicken.

Forgive me, and let us move on.

This isn’t so bad now, is it? It’s my take on a tapas platter. I’ve never eaten tapas in a restaurant before (shame, shame), but if someone brought me this I’d eat it. Okay, so it’s not Spanish, but this would be a lot easier if you shut up objecting and just listened to what’s on it. Oh, you’re not shouting at me? Well, you’re very well behaved.

Jamie’s Super Tasty Spanish Chicken left me with a heck of a lot of spuds to dispose of. Reheated potatoes, especially when eaten the following day, can have a tendency to taste weird and gluey, but luckily I really like cold new potatoes. So, how Spanish is that? New potato and chorizo… err… salad. And then we have Magic Beans from Allegra McEvedy’s Leon cook book. I made them yesterday from the beautiful beans I bought at the Hampshire farmer’s market, and it was a lovely new addition to my limited ‘how to cook green (and purple) beans’ repertoire. I now know two recipes.

You make these beans by frying 2 tbsp olive oil with 2 chopped cloves garlic, 1/2 chopped red chilli with seeds still in, 1 tbsp chopped rosemary (gross story) for a couple of minutes, or until the aromas are released. Then you add your topped (but not tailed) beans – 200g or so, and stir to coat them in the liquid. Then add 2tbsp lemon juice, 2 tbsp water, and cover with a lid and cook until soft – about 15 minutes. Then add 3 spring onions, cut into 8cm batons, season, and cook with the lid on until wilted. Then, rest for five minutes.

As you can see, purple beans go kind of black when they’re cooked… I sort of like it, although at the time I didn’t much appreciate the look. Maybe this is a good Halloween dish…?

The final cooked dish here was ratatouille (yay, I spelled it right without checking! But then I checked to see if I spelled it right, so I’m not sure if that counts…). I used the recipe from Angela Nilsen’s Ultimate Recipe Book– I love this book so much. It’s not so much the recipes, but the stories she writes before them. She takes a classic recipe, like hollandaise sauce or roast chicken (yes, we shall be doing this during the project!) and then tries to make it into the ultimate recipe by experimenting and talking to top chefs to get advice. Her spaghetti carbonara recipe is now the only one I’ll use.

So I used up my white aubergine and a yellow courgette (that’s eggplant and zucchini to you American folk) for this. I was the only one who ate it, but a portion is saved in the freezer for J, M’s veggie sister. I hope she likes it. I did!

That was the final cooked recipe – the last item on my not-so Spanish tapas board is a batch of golden cherry tomatoes, also from the market. They are delicious. I ate them with my fancy-schmancy French sea salt, and very good it was too.

Where’s the chicken? Well, that was being saved for a special leftover dish, of course…

Super Tasty Spanish Roast Chicken

September 4, 2009November 18, 20121 Comment

This week got off to a good start, after I went to the Hampshire Farmer’s Market to pick up a lovely free range chook from Noah’s Ark Farm. I was making another Jamie Oliver recipe, also from Jamie’s Dinners, called Super Tasty Spanish Roast Chicken – how could I resist, really? There’s no ‘cooked’ photo in the book, and I haven’t got one either, as I ran out of light, but the thought of crispy roast chicken skin tinged with the dark crimson of smoked paprika from the chorizo garnish was enough to get me motivated. I had to cheat here slightly as Jamie’s very keen that I buy an organic free range bird, but the only ones I found at the market were about double the price of a supermarket one. Why should I pay for a chicken to eat what I can’t afford? Pah!

So, here’s the bird – £8.41, not too bad. And with giblets… scary! Luckily, these were bagged and were swiftly removed to the freezer. I haven’t come across a recipe that needs them yet, but I’m sure I will, and it always seems to be when you don’t actually have any… I’ve had a traumatic past experience with giblets which gives me a totally legitimate reason to get freaked out by them, I’ll have you know. As a spotty youth I was charged with making the roast dinner at my uncle’s house one Sunday, and, for some reason, this involved me submerging a whole chicken in a sink of water, probably to defrost it. As I did so, the cavity filled with water, and out popped a dishevelled brown bag filled with chicken guts, which promptly exploded and covered my hands and the dead chicken with scraps of heart and liver. Ugh. I tend to keep away from guts now…

Anyway, so. Here’s the costing:

Noah’s Ark free range chicken, 2.2kg : £8.41
Tesco chorizo sausage : £2.99
2 for 1 baby potatoes, costed for one 1kg packet : 59p
4 lemons : £1.00
Bunch parsley : 79p
Garlic : 20p

Grand total : £13.71

Chorizo is so damn expensive, but luckily, it’s totally worth it.

So, Jamie wants you to make a (looks it up) gremolata, which is chopped lemon zest, raw garlic and parsley. Never made this before, and it was delicious. I don’t know that it will be my condiment of choice for roast chicken hereafter, but a little exploration is what it’s all about, right?

Note that Jamie’s recipe calls for a beaten egg – this phantom egg doesn’t appear in his online version, but it’s been confuddling cooks online for a while, because it never gets used in the recipe. I think maybe Jamie just wants you to beat an egg for this recipe so that you can ponder that age old question – which came first? His answer being, presumably, that the egg never came at all. Wow, philosophical…

So, here is the chicken all dressed up and ready to party. The cavity is filled with hot lemons and parsley stalks – I definitely will always boil my lemons first before adding them to a chicken to roast. I first came across this in another Jamie recipe and it really helps the lemon scent to flavour the bird – it steams it in lemon scent. Of course, I am an idiot, and I turned the oven off about ten minutes before this step, so the chicken had to sit on the side and generate some delightful bacteria before I could put it in the oven. No, luckily that didn’t happen, but obviously hot food + raw poultry + sitting around = bad idea.

Before you pop the chook in the oven, though, you have to cover it in damp parchment paper, which ‘seal in the juices’. I have to say, this part didn’t work so well for me. The paper got quite burned, and left a bitter taste to the flesh and juices, and charred paper also coloured the stock a muddy grey. I don’t know how necessary it is, but I might use foil if I did it again… Which I won’t for a WHOLE YEAR. Probably.

This is the stunt double meal – like I said, by the time I got to serving dinner, the light had totally gone, but luckily there was enough left over for me to take this shot the next day.

I served the chicken with ratatouille and Leon’s Magic Beans, and it was delicious.

Scores:

M gave it 8.5. He likes chorizo, he likes chicken, he likes potatoes. Altogether, a pretty good combo. The gremolata went down well, so a good success. But he did wonder how it was possible to ever score a 10, and frankly, so do I…

I gave it 8. I really liked it, but it somehow wasn’t chorizoy enough for me. I wanted the rich, greasy, spicy taste of the chorizo, cut with the zesty fire of the fresh lemon. It was a lot more subtle than that. Also, the parchment paper really didn’t do well on top, and I didn’t like having grey gravy… And, as per Jamie’s instructions, I sprinkled parsley on the top, which was a mistake, as it pretty much got cremated and turned very bitter. On the up side, it made delicious spuds and we had loads for lunch the next day!