I love a good chicken chow mein from my local takeaway. Our budget doesn't stretch to buying them as often as I'd like so I've learnt how to make my own chow mein sauce at home for a fraction of the cost. With a full portion of veggies it's a reasonably healthy meal so I don't feel the need to restrict it to one of our weekly "fakeaway" meals.
Ingredients:
1kg Chicken £5.30
1kg Stir Fry Vegetables £1.60
5 tbsp Olive Oil 20p
Soy Sauce 42p
All Spice Mix 25p
3 tbsp Brown Sugar 20p
2 tbsp Cornflour 20p
Noodles £1.10
Total = £9.27
Makes 12 servings = 77p per portion
Tools:
Tablespoon
A clean jam jar
A wok (or a large pan) and a pan
This is a super simple recipe. I'm using an old jam jar to mix the sauce. You can buy fancy flavour mixer things or bottles but a jam jar is free, it has a nice wide neck and you can pop the lid on and give it a really good shake to mix the cornflour in really well.
Just mix the sauce ingredients together and shake the jar - simples.
I've used about a quarter of the jar of all spice but this is very much personal preference. I've included the full bottle of soy sauce.
Instead of the usual chicken breast I've got chicken thigh fillets. If you check the price per kilo you should find that this is the cheapest boneless poultry.
Chop the chicken into bite sized chunks and divide it into four equal portions.
Add one quarter of the sauce to each tub. Press the chicken down into the sauce so that it's all covered. The chicken will marinade in the sauce as it freezes and again as it defrosts.
Then fill the tubs with one quarter of the frozen stir fry veg. I had to go to a different shop to get the frozen stir fry veg which I hate doing but it was worth the trip. Fresh veg doesn't freeze well at all so I would not advice doing this with fresh vegetables. Most of my batch cook recipes include fresh veg that has been well cooked and then frozen in a sauce so it doesn't matter than it will go mushy in the freezer. But mushy stir fry veg? No thank you. The pre-frozen veg has been flash frozen to keep it's texture.
To cook just throw the whole lot into a wok or large pan and cook until the chicken is cooked through.
I like the dried egg noodles so I cook them in a separate pan and add them to the cooked stir fry. If you're using straight to wok noodles you can just sling them in to heat through with the rest of the ingredients.
Linking up to:
Pop it in your Pinterest for later,
You can make the sauce up and keep that in the fridge for a few weeks. Add some frozen chicken breasts and stir fry veggies from the freezer and you've got a super quick and simple week night meal. I've some spare space in the freezer at the moment and a hungry primary schooler who just can't wait 5 minutes for her dinner, so I thought I'd batch everything up in advance this time round.
Here's my previous version with the sauce made separately.
#simplycrafting #budgterecipe #batchcooking #fakeaway #chickenchowmeinrecipe