Hot & sour noodle salad

And a little life update

There are a lot of recipes over on my now defunct food blog Recipes from a Normal Mum, so many (over 400) that I have decided I need to revisit and share some of them here. Now I know everyone expects me to be baking cakes 24/7, what with the Bake Off thing, but I mostly am a savoury cook these days. I do love cake, biscuits and the like but my cholesterol count doesn’t. Damn getting older. Promise I will post some baking recipes soon. If only to make myself feel mighty jealous.

Hot & Sour Noodle Salad

Serves 2, easily scaled up or down/adapted according to ingredients available.

This is one of those salads that can pretty much use up anything in your fridge. Don’t let the volume of ingredients put you off, it’s not time heavy at all. On an especially hot day I plan to make the dressing in the morning and then leave the chicken leisurely marinating in it all day, covered in the fridge, so that dinner is just chopping vegetables and boiling a kettle. (I don’t think I’ve recovered from the trauma of the 40 degree UK heat wave 2 years ago where I made toasties for dinner every evening in my pants. I truly gave up on cooking and outdoor clothes that week. We Brits aren’t made for hot hot weather are we? 22 degrees finds me shaving my legs and dusting off my denim skirt. 40 degrees leaves me speechless).

Ingredients:

For the dressing:

• 4 garlic cloves, peeled

• 1 thumb sized piece of ginger, peeled (teaspoons are really good for this)

• 1/2 large red chilli

• 1 tsp salt

• 1 tbsp sugar

• 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar (or white wine vinegar)

• 2 tbsp light soy sauce

• 2 tbsp peanut butter

• 1 tbsp sesame oil

• Juice of 1 lime

• 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

For the salad:

• 2 cooked chicken breasts, sliced or shredded

• 100g glass noodles (also called vermicelli, but you could use pasta or regular noodles instead)

• 4 carrots, peeled and cut into thin batons

• 1/3 cucumber, cut into thin batons

• 2 plums, destoned and thinly sliced

To garnish:

• 2 tbsp salted peanuts, finely chopped

• a handful of fresh, chopped coriander if you have it

Take all of the dressing ingredients and whizz up in a Nutri Bullet (my pref as no extra chopping required) or a food processor until finely chopped. If you use a food processor it might be worth chopping the chilli, ginger and garlic up a little before you add to the machine so that nobody ends up with big lumps of chilli on their salad. Stir the chicken through the dressing and set aside.

Place the glass noodles in a bowl and pour boiling water over them. Set a timer for 5 minutes and then drain in a sieve. Run the cold tap over the noodles to stop them cooking. Add the drained noodles to the chicken mixture along with the rest of the ingredients, toss well and serve piled into large bowls with salted peanuts scattered on the top and chopped coriander if you have it.

Sorry about the crappy photo, lighting not great, TV dinner in the sitting room, you know the drill.

Okay, onto the life update which will mostly be behind a paywall because I have to have some privacy, okay?

We’ve had the double whammy of SATS and GCSE’s last week. It’s been a lot. I remember back when the boys were small and still wanted to hold hands, thinking bloody hell this is exhausting. But really it wasn’t was it? I mean it was physically hard work, the lugging of changing bags and push chairs and spare clothes in the boot and a kite always on hand should the weather bless us. There were a lot of collected sticks and stones, small primary coloured plastic accoutrements from various magazines priced higher than a novel, clutched in sweaty palms. Not forgetting the sleep deprivation, that was enough to drive you demented. All that. But emotionally it just wasn’t. There was my own career disappointment to deal with and my marriage being less than