Post National Braai day leftovers RE-UTiLIZED: Chicken italiano

It’s a couple of days after National Braai day. A lot of meat and sides were enjoyed, but unfortunately with any feast comes a lot of leftovers. I’m not the biggest fan of leftovers but like it or not, they are a part of our lives. And as much as we can restrict quantities in our daily cooking, when you prepare a feast and you have a group of people over; it’s better to over cater than under.

So therefore I have a lot of leftovers, which I cannot waste or throw out. Times are tough, food prices keep escalating, so my family needs to be conscious of this and I’ve had to learn to re-utilize leftovers.

Dinner tonight: chicken Italiano, using leftover Braai chicken( marinated in citrus and hot spices) with beautiful grill marks and smoke from the fire. Son and daddy eating it with an Italian pasta, fettuccine. While mommy eats the chicken Italiane with a cucumber noodle/Asian green salad( Italy meets Asia in a mouthful).
NB: this works much better with chicken thighs as they don’t dry up as quickly as any other chicken piece.

What do you need?
Braai’ed leftover chicken thighs
Peeled canned tomatoes in tomato sauce
Fresh tomatoes with Italian tomatoes to serve
Fettuccine pasta
Onion( half red, half white)
Crushed Garlic
Spices: salt & pepper, dried sweet basil, dried oregano
Indian spices infused olive oil( homemade) or you can use normal olive oil.

Asian greens and cucumber.

What to do?

In a pan/pot, soften chopped onion, then 1 tbs of garlic. Then a whole can of peeled tomatoes in tomato sauce and 1 stock cube. Let this cook together on high heat for 2 minutes. After this time, add 50 ml of red wine and let this continue cooking for another 5 minutes, building the sauce. Then add the already cooked braai’ed chicken thighs, with 25ml of water.

In 5 minutes, start seasoning your dish, with 1 tbs of dried sweet basil, 1 tbs of oregano, 1 tbs of smoked paprika for some heat. Combine well and continue cooking for another 2 minutes.
Season with salt & pepper to taste, adding sprinkles of chili flakes. And it’s done.

While the chicken is cooking, quickly cook the fettuccine in salted boiling water for 7-10 minutes for el dente.

Toss salad greens with noodled cucumber on my noodling gadget. For dressing: zest orange,  squeeze lemon juice in a bowl, season with salt & pepper, plus my secret ingredient: aromat. The orange zest gives a much more Asian flavour compared to lemon, but we don’t want a sweet salad so sticking to lemon juice.

Dinner is ready. Serve with Italian tomatoes and chopped basil leaves to garnish.

My son and husband are eating the full meal and I’m enjoying the Italian style cooked chicken with a lemon & basil olive oil dressed cucumber noodles/green salad: I ate too much the day of the braai( barbeque), I have some making up to do.
And the boys look very happy for being not subjected to eating salad.

Either way, everyone wins. Delicious meal, happy family, Food saved, Money saved!