I make a variation of this recipe basically every time I do a roast or slow-cooked chicken. With only two of us in the household, we don’t use much chicken on the first meal, and while I love roast chicken, Andrew doesn’t like it much at all, so the leftovers always go into a pie.
This is another cricket lunchbox menu – I’m pleased to say that when I told my brother what was in our lunch hamper yesterday, the man in front of us turned around and said ‘That sounds absolutely amazing’, which made me feel very smug indeed. Because it really was a very good lunch, if I say so myself – chicken pastries, zucchini pesto muffins, spinach salad with apricots and blueberries (from the Green Kitchen App, which I enthusiastically recommend to your attention if you don’t have it already), apricot and peach schnapps shortbread, and crispy filo cigars full of fruit mince with double cream to dip them into. Yum.
(Though apparently my presence at the cricket causes concussions and batting collapses – yesterday wasn’t a good day for the batsmen on either side, and last year, I presided over Sri Lanka’s total collapse, with bonus concussions, on day three of the Boxing Day test. My brother wants me to come in to the MCG this afternoon to jinx the Brits, and I’m just trying to decide whether I can face the weather in the name of scientific enquiry.)
Anyway. These are full of lovely moist chicken, and sweetly spiced pumpkin and chickpeas, all leftover from Christmas Eve Lunch, though you could make this from scratch if you wanted to. And you might want to, because they are really delicious, warm or cold.
Your Leftovers & Shopping List
Leftover slow-cooked or roasted chicken (about half a chicken)
Leftover roasted carrots, roasted pumpkins and chickpeas, spiced with chilli, ginger, garlic and star anise; or use plain roasted pumpkins, one tin of chickpeas, and chop up one chilli, two garlic cloves and about 2cm of fresh ginger, and sauté briefly until they lose their rawness. You want this veggie mixture to be between half the weight of the chicken and one and a quarter times the weight – essentially, you don’t want the pastries to taste just of chicken or just of pumpkin, but it’s fine if one side dominates a bit.
2 tsp preserved lemon, finely chopped
1 packet filo pastry, and I strongly recommend you buy it from the fridge section, not the freezer section, because it is much, much easier to work with
olive oil spray
Now what will you do with it?
If the chicken is still on the bone, remove it from the bones, and remove the skin and any other bits that aren’t really edible (use these bits to make stock). Shred it into a large bowl.
Chop up the pumpkin and carrots, and add to the bowl with the chickpeas and preserved lemon (and spices, if you did them separately). Again, you shouldn’t need to season this, because you presumably seasoned your chicken and roast veg when you cooked them the first time.
Spray one sheet of filo pastry with olive oil, and put a spoonful of the chicken and pumpkin mix onto the lower half, towards the right hand end. Essentially, imagine the first fold, which will be folding the pastry in half lengthwise, and the second fold, which will be a triangle folding from the right hand corner up to the first fold, and aim to have your filling in the bit which will be covered by the second fold.
That was totally unintelligible so here is a picture.
Once you have a triangle, flip it over along its vertical side onto the next bit of pastry, then flip it down over its diagonal onto the next bit, then across, and so forth until you are out of pastry.
Put the resulting triangle onto a tray lined with baking paper, and spray it with more olive oil.
Repeat with the rest of the mixture and the filo pastry. (If you have excess filo pastry, I highly recommend making fruit mince cigars with the rest of it – but that’s a recipe for next Christmas, when I will actually pay attention to what I am doing so that I can write it down.)
Bake at 180°C for about half an hour, turning partway through the cooking time, until the filo is golden and crisp on each side. Serve hot or at room temperature – the filo will go soft if you have to refrigerate it, but it will still taste lovely.
Variations
This is obviously not a vegetarian meal, though it is dairy and egg free, and also nut free, for a change. It’s also fairly low GI, due to the chickpeas, and would be lower if you used sweet potato to replace part or all of the pumkpin.
It’s hard to think of a likely variation, since this is all leftovers-based, but you could, of course, make a larger pie, in which case I would layer the chicken with the pumpkin separately, and perhaps add ricotta or spinach layers or both. Diana Henry has a beautiful recipe along those lines.
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One year ago: A menu for the cricket
Two years ago: Easy pasta dinner
Wow, it has been a while, hasn’t it? I do apologise. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks in a state of exhaustion, between the demented craziness of getting the Project Grants in (an article came out on Thursday claiming that scientists last year collectively spent approximately 400 years on unsuccessful grants. While I feel that this figure is slightly exaggerated, it certainly felt like a decade or two was spent on them in the last month, and this was actually less time than I spent last year…), and some rather stressful things going on outside work. So when I go to start thinking about recipes for the next week, this happens:
