#SussYourFood Roast Chicken Dinner: Making the most of your chicken!
If you love a good old fashioned roast chicken dinner, you’re going to love these delicious recipes by The Wee Larder, who we worked in collaboration with back in April 2021.
In modern day Scotland, a roast chicken dinner is a classic Scottish meal to be eaten on a Sunday with the family! Quite often the leftovers are thrown away or put onto the compost heap and are wasted. However, you can create so many delicious recipes with those leftovers; from soups and stews, to pies and pastries. In this video, you will find four delicious recipes, from creating a roast chicken dinner, to a creamy chicken pie. We will then use the leftovers from both of these recipes to create a broth, and chicken and vegetable soup. What’s not to love? Tasty food, cooked zero waste style!
This collection of recipes is brought to you in collaboration with Angie from The Wee Larder, in honour of our #SussYourFood challenge, which encourages a reduction in food waste at home. The #SussYourFood challenge is helping the local families of Kirriemuir to reduce their food waste and make more sustainable food choices. The challenge covers everything from meal planning and portioning, to storage, recipe choices and more. The aim is to help people live lighter on the planet and help families save money in the process. Contact us f you would like to find out more or take part in the next round of our wonderful challenge. The #SussYourFood challenge is available to anyone living in the Kirriemuir and the Glens area.
The four recipes on the video are as follows:
- Roast Chicken Family Dinner
- Leftover Creamy Chicken Pie
- Leftover Chicken Broth
- Chicken and Vegetable Soup
More Recipe Ideas!
You will find many more recipe ideas over on The Wee Larder’s YouTube channel, along with other ideas for using up your leftover chicken meat if these ones don’t take your fancy. If videos aren’t your thing, please check out Angie’s blog, The Wee Larder, for the 4 full written recipes covering ingredients and methods.
Tips for making this collection of recipes!
Purchase the best quality chicken you can afford. Angie likes to buy Organic or Free Range chicken and although they are a bit more expensive, she aims to use up every single piece to make it worth every penny.
You can save your leftovers in the fridge after making your initial roast chicken dinner. This means that you don’t have to make the chicken pie recipe or stock recipe straight away and gives you the chance to make it the next day.
Use up what’s in your fridge to create the vegetable base of your roast chicken dinner! It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, any vegetables will do. We like to use carrots, potatoes, any other root vegetable, and even peppers or courgette work well too. Always top it off with a good handful of unpeeled garlic cloves. These work really well in the stock the next day and you can also eat them with your chicken dinner.
If you want more flavour, you can stuff the chicken with oatmeal, finely chopped onion, a few tablespoons of butter and a few garlic cloves, or half a lemon in the cavity. This gives the chicken a delicious flavour and works really well as a side for serving too. To keep the recipe simple, Angie hasn’t included a stuffing, but feel free to include one on your own.
Angie’s chicken was cooked for around an hour and a half, but please check the cooking time for your chicken and the temperature on the back of the chicken packet before cooking, as all chicken weights will need different times to cook.
If you don’t have a lot of chicken leftover for your chicken pie, you can use meaty mushrooms or cooked potatoes to bulk it out. We like to keep the meat from the wings and some of the fiddly parts of the legs for the soup at the end.
Experiment with the soup vegetables, as you can use whatever you have available. Swap out the vegetables in the soup recipe for similar quantities of a different vegetable.
If you have stock leftover, store it in the fridge and use it up as soon as possible. You can use it to cook vegetables, add liquid to stews or other meals cooking in a pot.
You can buy a jar or two of white sauce in the supermarket to make the pie even easier.
Save all of your vegetable scraps from the first roast chicken recipe when preparing your vegetables, pop them into a freezer bag and save for later.
You can also make the broth with lamb or beef bones, and the soup recipe would work well with these too.
The recipe is for a good old fashioned chicken stock, but if you want to make a traditional nutritious bone broth, then you should cook the leftover bones etc. for 24-48hrs. This will give you an even more nutritious, gelatinous broth, that may be good for the body in many ways.
