Thing Number Six - Chicken Croquettes

If I'm roasting a chicken, I do want to make sure I use all of it - picking over the carcass to get every last bit of meat, and then boiling up the bones for stock.  Sometimes I'll use up the chicken-pickings by making croquettes along these lines - basically, binding the meat in a really thick white sauce, covering dollops of the mixture in breadcrumbs, and frying them.  And I was going to do that now, until I realised that the leftover bread sauce in the fridge was effectively a ready-made croquette base, already flavoured to go well with chicken, and raring to go...

This isn't a very quantity sort of recipe - it's made, after all, from leftovers, which aren't all that controllable.  I went with a roughly equal volume of cooked chicken (minced; or if, like me, you're between mincers at the moment, then finely chopped) and leftover bread sauce.  Mix the two together.  Because the sauce has plenty of flavour already, I didn't think it needed anything else adding; and since it had just come out of the fridge the mixture didn't need to be chilled back to firmness - you're good to go straight away.

Form spoonfuls of the mixture into balls (or whatever other shape you feel befits a croquette).  Roll these in beaten egg...

...and then dredge them around a plate of seasoned breadcrumbs. 

Then fry the croquettes - don't go mad on the temperature; this is largely an exercise in thoroughly reheating everything, and if the pan's too hot, you'll burn the outside before the middle's had a chance to get warm. 

(Mine ended up less spherical and more un-nameably geometric; each side cooked flat.  Makes no odds to the taste, though.)

These worked really well.  There's something oddly familiar about them that I can't place, but suffice to say they fall into that sort of comforting, school-dinners-only-nicer bracket that's just what winter calls for.  I still might not rush to make bread sauce again, but now I do at least have a backup plan as to what to do with it if I happen to be landed with some...