Superquick noodles for lunch

Not even an attempt at authenticity, just a need for a quick, filling lunch that would involve vegetables and some of the leftover chicken sitting in my fridge.

Mix equal quantities (by eye, no need to obsess) of peanut butter, oil, soya sauce and chilli jam. This will take quite a long time if, like me, you've given up on ordinary peanut butter (full of palm oil, don't even think about it, it's the saturated fat as well as the orang utangs) and are finishing up a jar of the old-fashioned sort that separates like it used to when we were children. Boil the noodles. Mix. Add whatever you've got: today it was chopped chicken, spring onion and thin slices of red pepper. Next time it could easily involve cucumber. Or lightly cooked slices of pak choi. etc.

But some of you will have noticed from the paragraph above that I do obsess - it took me ages, and a lot of reading the small print on labels, to find a peanut butter that we can eat (in small quantities, it's still 50% fat, albeit mostly "good" ones): Organic Meridian Crunchy Peanut Butter.

If there was no chilli jam in the house, which sometimes happens, then I'd put in some ginger, garlic, perhaps a little nam pla. And it occurs to me that this sauce would be very good to pep up a bit of chicken, made in the morning and marinaded until it was time to start cooking supper.

I'm going to try the noodles out on the family at the weekend, with some home-made Char siu, along the lines Nigella calls char sui-ish ... in other words, I'm not going to consult a Chinese cookery book!


PS this is my entry for Heart of the Matter round three. It's pasta dishes this time - I didn't think Chinese noodles would count as pasta, but Ilva, who is hosting this round over at Lucullian Delights, says that it does ...