Tag: Christmas

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

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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.

Week One : Leftovers - Hot and numbing chicken and cucumber

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

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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.
Red Thai curry
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.

Your easiest luxury Christmas shop ever!

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Have you guys heard of Hello Fresh? They’re an amazing company that sends you boxes full of ingredients every week so you can make gourmet meals from scratch. Forget veggie boxes – this is where its at!

Hello Fresh have come up with a genius idea to take all of the stress out of that Christmas shop this year with their Christmas box! And, you can get £10 off with the code FOODFASHFIT, making it even more tempting! Inside the box are the ingredients you’ll need to put together a delicious meal for 4-6 people, or 8-10 people if you’ve got extended family coming over. It seems like they’ve literally thought of everything!

Included in the box are ingredients to prepare a prawn cocktail starter (my favourite!), plus turkey and all the trimmings, a Christmas pudding – and a cheeseboard! A cheeseboard! Now, that’s Christmas luxury! The food has been sourced from top quality providers, including sausages and bacon from Tom Hixson of Smithfield Market, a free range Copas turkey (which won a Great Taste award), and prawns from James Knight in Mayfair (who holds two Royal Warrants, if you please!).

The prawn cocktail starter is made using delicious tiger prawns, and for the main course there’s a whole host of goodies. For the 4-6 people option, you get a 2.5kg turkey breast, pop-up cooking timer (a Godsend!), cranberry sauce with rosemary, free range Goose fat, sage and onion stuffing with red onion, and gravy with cracked black pepper. You also get pigs in blankets, and a selection of veggies (including red cabbage, sprouts, carrots, and parsnips) to make side dishes like garlic and herb infused Brussels sprouts with toasted pine nuts (recipes included, of course)! Plus, there’s your good old fashioned spuds – which, trust me, will taste amazing with that goose fat! For pudding, there’s another Royal seal of approval from the Christmas pudding makers, Wilkin and Sons, which is accompanied by brandy butter – and you get some mince pies, too.

And, finally, that gourmet cheese board with creamy Wenslydale with cranberries, reblochon, and red Leicester, plus, a variety of crackers.

What, you thought that was it? Nope! This is Christmas, people – time to really push the boat out! You also get some treats to round everything off with – Joe and Steph’s mince pie popcorn, candy canes, Prestat choccies, and table crackers!

I’d say that with all of that, Christmas is pretty much sorted! The Christmas box for 8-10 contains the same products in larger quantities (for example, a whole 5kg Copas turkey instead of a turkey breast). They’re even going to pop in some ideas for the leftovers, too.

The Christmas box costs £155 for 4-6, or £225 for 8-10. But, don’t forget my FOODFASHFIT code, which brings it down by a tenner! You already save up to 35% on the RRP of these items with these economical boxes, and with £10 off, those savings jump even more.

I’ll be testing out a Hello Fresh box or two in the upcoming weeks, so look out for that – and make sure to use that FOODFASHFIT code if you order – its valid on any boxes, even the non-Christmas ones!

Schmalzy Chicken

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This week’s chicken was a relatively simple affair. I decided to invite dear old mum and dad over for lunch, so we could swing by St Francis, a local animal rescue centre, where they were putting on a fund raising event. We’d (well, they) just adopted a lovely new dog by the name of Ben, so we decided to take him back to see all his old chums. He had an absolute blast, being treated like a right celebrity.

Anyway, that’s beside the point – the point was, I decided to make the chicken recipe simple, because I was serving it as part of a traditional British Sunday lunch. Americans, this is what we also eat at Christmas – only a much more elaborate version. It’s also the nearest thing you get to a Thanksgiving style meal here – swap the turkey for the chicken, and you see what I mean.

So, the recipe was Nigella Lawson’s Schmalzy Chicken, which is from possibly my favourite book of hers, Feast. The recipe is simplicity itself, and I don’t think I’m going to get a cheaper chicken dish out of this entire year – mostly because I bought one of Tesco’s ‘3 for £10’ chickens. Well, two, in fact. And lamb steaks.

Week Three: Tesco Chicken

So, that’s the semi-abused chicken. And here’s the costing:

Tesco Chicken: £3.33 (to infinity)

Grand total: £3.33

Yep, that was all I bought. The recipe calls for salt and a chicken. I’m down with that.

The idea here is that you render down the chicken fat you find inside the carcass, and then rub it over the chicken and roast it, so that the chicken gets meltingly tender and soft, and all deliciously savoury. I had a cunning plan to use three times the amount of chicken fat you would normally get from a chicken, by saving the fat from the inside of next week’s chicken. But, I didn’t tell M and he threw it away. Foiled! The other third was generously donated by the fat I skimmed off the top of Jamie’s chicken broth.

Rendering the chicken fat

Rendering the chicken fat is just  a fancy way of saying you cook it until all you have left is a pool of ‘schmalz’ and a wizened little piece of chickeny stuff. You can eat this, or shove it up the chicken’s bum to flavour it. That’s what I did…

Week Three: Pre-Schmalzy Chicken

This is the chicken pre-schmalz, sitting in the roasting pan that M’s mum gave me. It makes the chicken really moist thanks to the lid, but it also had the side-effect of not letting the chicken brown so much all over.

Week Three: Schmalzy Chicken

At first glance, this doesn’t seem like so much of a triumph, but that’s because you can’t taste it. Moist and delicious! The taste wasn’t complex at all, but somehow more ‘chickeny’ than chicken normally is… Amazing! And, with a cheapy chook, too. I wouldn’t say this was a miracle, but it certainly was a revelation. Shame I couldn’t get the skin any crispier, though – should have left the lid off.

Week Three: Proper British Roast with Schmalzy Chicken

This was the meal we ate our chicken with – a good old roast. Peas, fancy carrots, roast potatoes, stuffing balls, pigs in blankets, and gravy. Delicious.

So, the scores.

My dear old mum gave it 9. She would – everything I do well reflects on her, of course. Any chicken cooked by a child of hers is sure to score no lower than a 9.

My dad gave it 8. Very tasty and moist, he reckoned.

M gave it 7. It’s a simple recipe, and a simple, clean taste, but there’s nothing spectacular about it.

I gave it 7.5. It’s easy to do, tastes good and is cheap – what more could you want? Shame I couldn’t brown it all over, cos with crispy skin this could have been really special.

There wasn’t much leftover chicken here, but what there was got made into the most unphotogenic curry you ever did see. Except you’ll never see it, hah.