I started this by roasting two chickens. Don’t worry….this recipe only uses half a chicken. I roasted two chickens because the meal planned for the next day is chicken with salad and I want to have extra for two more meals. My plan for next week is a chicken noodle soup and a chicken stir-fry. So for the almost £8 I spent on chicken, I have four meals for our family of six and even with veggies/ rice/ noodles to complete the meals each should cost more than about £5 a meal. That is a deal.

For this meal, I got inspiration from Farmhouse on Boone. She has a recipe for sourdough skillet which is where I got the sourdough discard topping basics. Hers calls for a mature starter I think but mine is more of a Peter Pan starter….it just doesn’t want to grow up. Honestly, I lost focus on her recipe after reading to add several eggs, a bit of butter and some baking powder. Not sure if she said to add seasoning or not. She has some great recipes so well worth a look over there.

Chicken Sourdough Casserole. (Serves 6-8)

Filling:

1/2 a roast chicken

3 carrots

1 large leek

1 red pepper

1 cup frozen sweet corn

750g frozen mixed vegetables

1 vegetable stock cube

Salt and pepper to taste

2 tablespoons tomato and chilli chutney

Sourdough topping:

500g sourdough starter discard

4 eggs

4 tablespoons butter

2 teaspoons baking powder

Salt and pepper (I did 8 twists of each into mine)

1 tablespoon nutritional yeast

Method:

I just put all the vegetables and seasoning into my big pot roast pan (similar in size to a shallow casserole pan or a very large skillet) with about 1/2 cup of water and let it cook until all the veg was soft. Softness is a personal preference but we don’t like crunch. While that cooked I added all the topping ingredients to my blender and blended it smooth. Once the veg was cooked I added the chopped up meat from half a chicken and mixed well. Poured over the topping and put it in the oven at about 200C / 400F. Baked it until starting to go golden and the topping was firm.

This is a VERY filling meal. Normally, this amount of food is wiped out in minutes by the 6 fully grown people in this house but this recipe was too much. I will have leftovers for tomorrow.

I also used some of this filling (minus the chicken) to make a small vegetable and cheese casserole for my youngest as she is trying to be vegetarian. I couldn’t get this to be vegan because I haven’t the expertise on how to make the egg substitution (silken tofu maybe?) so stuck with normal cheese but if I can manage to sort the substitutions I could just replace the cheese with nootch for the flavour.

This was an excellent and reasonably priced family dinner which I think will make it into a regular for the meal planning. I would think it would also work well for a freezer meal. Enjoy!