Sugar-Free Thai Sweet Chilli Chicken Noodles

This is one of my favourite lazy, sugar-free recipes. Sure, you can pick up a bottle of sweet chilli sauce from most places, but it'll be packed with processed sugar and other artificial crap!

My cooking is all about eliminating those processed nasties and replacing them with natural alternatives, all without taking half a day to prepare and cook. Most sugar-free sweet chilli sauce recipes will take over an hour of cooking just to prepare the sauce, and will stink out your kitchen! (this one won't)

So, what do you need - this comfortably feeds 2 hungry adults:

• 2 tbsp of honey
• 2 tbsp of chilli puree
• 2 tbsp of white wine or cider vinegar
• 1 tbsp of garlic puree
• 1 tbsp of light olive oil
• 1 skinned boneless chicken breast, thinly sliced
• 1 small brown onion, thinly sliced (not chopped)
• 1 carrot, thinly sliced into rounds
• About a dozen cubes of pineapple
• 1/2 cup of cashew nuts
• 1 tbsp of cornflour mixed to a paste with cold water
• 1 cup of fresh apple or pineapple juice (not concentrate)
• 2 nests of medium egg noodles

Now, before you embark on gathering all of this together, make sure you check a few of your ingredients, as some purees and noodles (dried noodles usually don't contain sugar, but fresh ones can) can contain processed sugar. It's usually pretty cheap and easy to grab ones without sugar from the fresh vegetable aisle in your supermarket (easy sugar-free cooking is all about checking the labels on your produce). The same goes for your pineapple, try and use fresh or frozen, avoid tinned fruit like the plague!

Preparation:

Put the honey, chilli, vinegar, garlic and olive oil in a wok or large pan and stir together well. Add the chicken and stir until thoroughly coated. Leave to rest for five minutes whilst you prepare your vegetables.

Peel your onion and top and tail it, then cut it in in half lengthways before slicing thinly. Next, peel the carrot and slice into thin rounds. As for the pineapple (I use frozen, but you can use fresh), just roughly chop this into about 1cm cubes. Top tip - I find it really useful to put my prepared vegetables into separate bowls ready to cook.

Finally, boil a pan of fresh water (with a pinch of salt added) ready for the egg noodles.

Cooking:

1. Add your dried egg noodles to the pan with the boiling water in it. After 2-3 minutes remove them from the heat, strain them and set to one side;
2. Take the wok with the chicken and sauce in and place it on a medium heat, stir regularly until all of the chicken has sealed (gone from pink to white), this should only take 4-5 minutes;
3. Then add the onions and the carrot and continue to saute on a medium heat for a further 4-5 minutes;
4. Once the carrot and onions have softened, add the cashew nuts and the pineapple chunks; stir for a further 1-2 minutes;
5. At this stage add the juice (I prefer apple to pineapple as it is less sharp, but go with whatever you fancy) and gently bring it to the boil. Simmer for 2-3 minutes;
6. Now, gently and a little at a time, add the cornflour paste to the wok until the sauce reaches a nice consistency, it shouldn't be too thick as you want it to coat the noodles (remember, you might not need all the paste);
7. Once the sauce has thickened, add your noodles to the wok and toss to coat them in the sauce;
8. Serve immediately into warm bowls and enjoy!

I really hope you enjoy this recipe and can feel guilt-free about eating my homemade takeaway food! I do a lot of my cooking on the fly, and always adjust the amounts of certain ingredients to suit my own tastes, so the quantities here might need a bit of tweaking to suit yours, but I find they're great for most palates (personally, I like to add another spoon of chilli, but it gets a bit hot for the family).