Chicken pasta sauce with ‘zoodles’ (zucchini noodles)
I’ve had a few requests for this simple-but-delicious recipe, (mostly from my friend Sue-Ellen, who won’t stophassling me!)so here it finally is. 😉 I’ve been a bit absent on my blog for the last couple of weeks due to overwhelmingness of all sorts, but I’m determined to get this posted… I had thoughtof keepingit up my sleeve for my cookbook, but that’s going awfully s-l-o-w-l-y (inducingsome of the aforesaid overwhelmingness) so I thought I might as well post it.
This is one of those recipes thatis great to make when you want a chicken to‘stretch’ a long way. If you buy organic and/or free range chicken like I (usually)do, it’s nice to have recipes that only need 300g of chicken but still feed six people. If I’m starting with a whole chicken, I cut off the thighs and brown meat from the legs and use that. I use the breasts for another recipe, and then I use the meaty carcass to make soup from.
However, this time I did things a bit differently. It allstarted with a crazy day andno menu plan,which I wouldn’t usually recommend, but somehow it worked out…
At 5.30pm I realised everyone was going to bebugging me very soon for dinner, so I dashed out to the freezer to see what I had.I dug around and founda kilo of chicken thigh fillets, which were of course frozen into a solid block. I have no microwave (yep,I’m one of those weird people whor*fuse to have one), so I chucked thefrozen block of chickeninto my big stock pot on the stove, coveredit with about 4 litres ofwater and turned the heat on full blast. Iroughly chopped an onion, a leafy celery stalk plus some extra celery leaves, a couple of carrots, a handful of parsley and afew cloves of garlic,and chucked them allin (Jamie Oliver style – well, I like to think so anyway), splashed in a couple of tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, added a bay leaf, some Italian herbs anda couple of teaspoons ofCeltic sea salt, and popped the lid on. Then I started the pasta sauce in the Thermomix for the chicken pasta. As soon as the thighs in the soup pot werecooked a bit on the outside and I could pry a few off the ‘block’, I added them (slightly frozen still) to the Varoma to steam above the pasta sauce. (Oh, and I turned the heat down on the stove so the chicken soup was simmering more gently, and left it for a couple of hours.)
So here’s the pasta recipe –I’ll get back to the chicken soup in a minute…
Note: You can find Fine sea salt,Aussie Kibble Pepper and Organic Garlic for this recipe in my online store!
Chicken Pasta with Zoodles
2014-07-06 00:21:52
Ingredients
- 1 brown onion, halved
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1/2 half a red capsicum, deseeded
- 30g olive oil or butter
- 800g fresh, ripe tomatoes, halved (preferably organic vine ripened for extra flavour!)
- 150g mushrooms
- 100g tomato paste
- 100g water
- 2 Tbspns chicken or vege stock paste
- 1 tsp Italian herbs (dried) or some fresh oregano & basil, chopped
- 1 tsp Rapadura
- 1 tsp balsamic vinegar
- 300g chicken thigh fillets
Instructions
- Chop onion, garlic and red capsicum in Thermomix bowl on speed 5 for 3 seconds
- Add oil or butter and saute for 3 minutes at 100C, reverse speed 1
- Add tomatoes and chop at speed 6 for 6-10 seconds, depending how chunky you like your sauce
- Add mushrooms and chop on speed 3 for 5 seconds (or less if you like them chunkier)
- Add remaining ingredients (except chicken) and cook at Varoma temperature for 30 minutes, reverse speed 1. Place Varoma tray on top, with chicken thighs (halved) inside (more if you like) to steam while the sauce cooks
- While the pasta sauce is cooking, make the zoodles (zucchini noodles). If you have a Benriner (pictured above) or other type of vege spiralizer, you can use that - I highly recommend them, they're awesome! You just pop the raw veges in and turn the handle, and you can use different sized blades for different types of 'noodles'.
- When the pasta sauce is finished cooking, pull chicken apart roughly with two forks and add to the sauce. Serve over the raw zoodles.
Quirky Cooking https://quirkycooking.com.au/
If you don’t have a Benriner, don’t despair – you can just use a potato peeler to peel thin strips of zucchini for the ‘pasta’. (See this recipe for ‘Raw Pasta Sauce’ for a picture of zucchini noodles made with a potato peeler.)
Okay, back to the soup…
After dinner was done and cleaned up, the soup had been simmering for about 2 hours, the chicken was spoon-tender,and the liquid was reduced by at least half. I turned off the heat and added a couple of handfuls of raw zoodles (which were leftover from dinner), and left it to cool. Because the liquids had reduced so much, it had become a condensed soup, which is perfect for me as I never have much room in my fridge. A condensed soup takes up less room, and you just add some water (to taste) when you are ready to heat it up again.
We ate the soup the next day for lunch, warmed gently on the stovetop with a bit more water added. (Sorry, don’t remember how much, but just taste and see how strong you like it.) Let me just mention here that the Celticsea salt makes a big difference in flavour – regular table salt just won’t be the same. If you don’t have Celtic sea salt (the chunky, grey, wet kind of salt that’s hand harvested), you may want to add a little stock paste for more flavour.
Chicken Zoodle Soup
And I caved in and made spelt bread to go with it, which totally negated my ‘grain free’ idea, but anyway– this chicken soup and hot-out-of-the-oven speltbread is the best comfort food there is, in my opinion. Even better than chocolate. And that’s saying something for a chocoholic like me!!
I hope that adequately explains how to make the soup and pasta – I’ll make it again soon and check if I wrote that down correctly – it was all a bit slap-dash at the time, as usual. Please tweak to taste!
Jo 🙂
