The Game Changers are upping their game in the kitchen with an emphasis on eating all home-cooked meals to be kinder to our wallets and our hearts. We like to plan three to four days of meals so that our meat and produce doesn’t go to waste and is consumed at the peak of freshness. As we experiment with new recipes and making conscious decisions to choose quality ingredients, some dishes turn out to be duds while others as charming delights. Herein lies a newly discovered favorite dinner that has been added to the Jager archives for future satisfaction: Mediterranean Rice Noodles. This recipe has been modified from its original publication in “Clean Eats” by Alejandro Junger, M.D.

Ingredients: 

• 2 cooked chicken breasts, sliced
• 1 package rice noodles
• 2 to 3 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 pound fresh green beans, ends snipped off and steamed
• About 10 cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
• 1/4 cup pitted black olives, halved
• 8 to 10 fresh basil leaves, halved
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 1 to 2 teaspoons of salt
• 2 to 3 dashes of soy sauce
• Freshly ground black pepper to taste
• Feta cheese to garnish

Directions: 

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
2. Place raw noodles in a large bowl and fill with hot water to soak for 30 minutes.
3. Spray a 9 x 13 in an oven-safe dish with olive oil (PAM) and place chicken breasts in the dish. Lightly salt and pepper chicken and cover with a sheet of parchment paper. Bake for 20-25 minutes at 450 degrees before checking for an internal temperature of 165 degrees.
4. While the noodles and chicken are cooking, snip the ends of green beans with kitchen scissors and half them into a steamer with boiling water for about 7 minutes until bright green and tender, set aside. (The green beans can also be blanched in boiling water until cooked and immediately submerged in ice water to stop the cooking). 
5. Slice the olives, tomatoes, and basil leaves. Set aside.
6. Chop the cooked chicken. Drain the noodles and chop them into 6-inch sections.
7. Heat a skillet with olive oil. Stir together the noodles, tomatoes, olives, beans, chicken in the skillet.
8. Dash with soy sauce until the clear noodles are light brown. Add lemon juice, salt, and pepper to taste.
9. Add the basil leaves. Remove from heat.
10. Garnish with feta cheese. Noodles can also be served over white rice.

Notes:

• While the dish is titled Mediterranean Rice Noodles, I modified the original recipe to incorporate our love of Japanese cooking. We both preferred the addition of soy sauce and my husband insisted on adding chicken.
• I prefer to use Maifun Rice Sticks from our local Asian grocery, but I have also used KAME that can be purchased at our Midwest grocery chain, Meijer. Rice noodles cook by soaking in hot water and don’t need to be boiled.
  

  

  

   

• While the chicken could be prepped the day before, I often include the cooking time during preparation so I set the oven to a higher temperature and slice the breasts into thin sections for expediated cooking time.
  

  

  

   

•  I use the cooking time to slice and steam vegetables so that the final step is simply mixing them all together in the skillet.

TA-DAH!