Family Lockdown Cooking: Chicken and Pepper

You don’t need a lot of leftover roast chicken to make a delicious weekday meal. You can keep everything simple and quick when making a leftover chicken dish because all the flavours from roasting the chicken go straight into a new dish without any effort. I’ve kept it nice and simple for this lockdown series and chosen Chicken and Red Pepper because it’s kid-friendly, can be served with pasta, rice or quinoa and is easy to spice up if you have a heat-addiction (like me) Peppers are full of vitamin C which boosts your immune system and they’re incredibly easy to cook so it’s a do-good, low-stress dish.

INGREDIENTS
Serves 2 Adults and 2 Kids
200-300g leftover roast chicken
400g tin of chopped tomatoes
1 tbsp olive oil
1 large pepper of any colour
1 small onion
150ml of water in the chopped tomato tin
2 tsp sugar
1.5 tsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dried mixed herbs (or dried thyme)
200g rice
500ml water
1/4 tsp salt

• You start by stripping down the chicken. Me and the kids love the dark meat from roast chicken (legs and wings) and Paul’s a breast-man (what’s life without a pun or two) so there’s usually a whole breast left on our chicken which is easy to remove and cut into bite-sized pieces. Make sure you flip the chicken over and get the meat on the back because there are tasty morsels hidden away in there.

• Before getting on with the rest of the sauce, get your rice started. By the time the rice is done you’ll be ready to serve. Put the rice in a small pan then pour over the water and 1/4 tsp of salt. Give it a stir then put the pan on a very high heat. Keep an eye on the pan and as soon as the water starts to boil put a lid on and turn the heat down to medium low. Set a timer for 20 minutes and DO NOT REMOVE THE LID until the timer goes off.

• You don’t need to be precise when cutting veggies for this kind of sauce. Peel and chop the onion and deseed and chop the pepper. Just make sure things are roughly the same size so that they cook at the same speed.
• Put the olive oil in a large frying pan or skillet on a medium high heat then chuck in the veggies and let them cook, soften and get a little colour; about 5 minutes should do it.
• Tip in the sugar, salt, garlic powder and herbs then stir. Give it 30-60 seconds. Open the tin of chopped tomatoes and pour the toms into the pan. Put 150ml of water into the chopped tomato tin, swirl it around to get any last bits of tomato then pour the tomato water into the pan as well. Give everything a stir to mix the tomatoes, water and veggies together.
• Add the chopped, roasted chicken into the pan and gently stir to cover in the sauce (you don’t want the chicken to fall apart too much in the sauce so it stays tender). Turn the heat down to medium and cook for 5-10 minutes until the chicken is heated through. Once the timer goes off for the rice use a fork to fluff up the grains then dish up along with the chicken and peppers.