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

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.

Bukkake udon

If you’re sniggering right now – shame on you! ‘Bukkake’ means splash in Japanese, and this is a chilled noodle dish that you ‘splash’ cold stock over to flavour it. The first time I made this I got the recipe from oyamake.com, but the site is down now. I didn’t have the right toppings so I improvised! It was delicious, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t usually like udon noodles…

This is a really great summer dish for when it’s incredibly hot and steamy… It actually cools you down and refreshes you! Hopefully, we’ll have plenty of reason to make this dish this year…

Bukkake udon toppings

Recipe for Bukakke Udon

INGREDIENTS

  • Around 100g dry udon noodles per person
  • 1/3 cup mirin
  • 1/3 cup soy sauce
  • Instant dashi powder
  • Your choice of topping (see below)

RECIPE

  • Mix 1 cup water, 1/3 cup mirin and 1/3 cup soy sauce in a pan, heat and add some dashi stock sprinkles. Remove from heat and sit until cold. You won’t need all of this but it’ll keep for another day if you put it in the fridge in a sealed container.
  • Cook the udon noodles according to the recipe on the packet, remove from heat, strain and wash until cold.
  • Place the noodles in a bowl and add your toppings – mine are spring onions (scallions), toasted teriyaki nori sheets and some bonito flakes. You can also add boiled egg (according to about.com), grated daikon radish or tenkasu (dry tempura drippings). If you want some, add a smear of wasabi paste on top.
  • Splash your sauce over the top, but be careful not to drown the noodles as the sauce is very strong!

Second attempt at bukkake udon - the finale

This is the kind of thing you can knock up from storecupboard ingredients if you’re a Japanese food fanatic like I am – so I consider it to be quite a cheap dish, although if you had to buy everything in especially it’d probably cost a fair bit.