Chilli Chicken with Noodles

Last night's challenge was to find am interesting recipe for chicken, that would use some of the veg and stuff that we already had in. So we adapted a really nice recipe from the Chinese Food Made Easy book we have. This makes a lovely sized meal for two and the sauce is really fragrant and full of flavour.

Ingredients:

150g noodles (any are fine, we used straight to wok for simplicity)

approx 250g chicken breast fillets sliced into strips (about 1 and half chicken breasts)

1 courgette sliced into strips (we had some yellow ones that our neighbour grew)

1/2 red pepper sliced into strips

2 tablespoons light soy sauce

2 spring onions sliced lengthways

For the Sauce:

3 garlic cloves crushed and finely chopped

2 cm piece of ginger grated

1 medium red chilli deseeded and finely chopped

1/2 red pepper finely chopped

2 tomatoes finely chopped

5 tablespoons water

2 tablespoons of tomato relish (we used chilli and tomato chutney)

1 teaspoon soft light brown sugar

In the original recipe you're meant to blitz all the ingredients in a blender but as we don't have one we decided to experiment with our sauce. Instead my lovely assistant chopped all the ingredients for the sauce really really small and I warmed it in a little pan over a very low heat to reduce down a little. While the sauce was cooking I then stir fried the chicken over a high heat for about 2-3 minutes. When the chicken had begun to brown I added the courgette and pepper and stir fried those for about 1-2 minutes. I then added the sauce from the sauce pan and brought it all to boil. When the sauce was bubbling away I added the noodles and soy sauce and cooked for a couple of minutes. The spring onions go in for a couple of seconds at the end just before serving. 

The chilli sauce has a wonderful spicy flavour without an overwhelming amount of heat and with it being a little thicker in this version it really coats the chicken and veg nicely.