Asian Chicken Noodle Broth

Week 16 of the Cookbook Challenge and the theme is Noodles. Surprisingly not a lot of my cookbooks have any noodle recipes in them. However as often happens, Jamie came to the rescue with the Ministry of Food book. Speaking of Jamie, if you haven’t already make sure you see his speech on educating kids about food at Ted.com

Ingredients

1 tablespoon mixed seeds (pumpkin, poopy, sunflower)

a small handfull cashew nuts

2 skinless chicken breasts

2 teaspoon 5 spice

sea salt and freshly ground pepper

olive oil

thumb sized piece of fresh ginger

1 fresh red chilli

1 chicken stock cube

100g rice noodles

a handful of snow peas

6 thin asparagus spears

6 baby corn

soy sauce

juice of 1 lime

small handful of spinach leaves

Boil the kettle. Put a medium fry pan or wok on high heat and add the seeds and cashew nuts to it straight away, while it’s heating up. Put a large saucepan on high heat. Fill the saucepan with a litre of boiling water from the kettle and put a lid on it. Toss the seeds and nuts around until heated through nicely – this will take a couple of minutes. While this is happening, slice your chicken breasts lengthways into 3 pieces and put them into a bowl. Sprinkle the chicken with the five spice and a good pinch of salt and pepper and stir. When the seeds and nuts are done, transfer them to a plate. Put the empty pan back on a high heat. Add a little olive oil to your hot pan with your slices of chicken and cook for 5 minutes, until golden, tossing and turning every now and again.

While the chicken’s cooking, peel and finely slice your ginger and slice your chilli. Crumble the stock cube into the pan of boiling water. Add half the chilli, all the ginger, your noodles, snow peas, asparagus and corn, with 2 tablespoons of soy sauce. Bring to the boil and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring. Halve the lime and squeeze in the juice. By the time the noodles and veg are done, the chicken will be cooked. Take a piece of chicken out and slice it lengthways to check if it’s cooked all the way through – when done, remove all the chicken from the pan and slice each piece in half to expose the juicy chicken inside (don’t be tempted to overcook it). To serve, divide the spinach leaves between your bowls and pour over the broth, noodles and vegetables. Divide the chicken pieces over and scatter with the toasted seeds, cashews and remaining chilli.