Uyghur ‘Big Plate’ Chicken with Hand-Pulled Noodles

As a teenager, I spent a few months in China with the Australian fencing team, training at the Shanghai sports school. I was the only person in the group who spoke any Mandarin, and so I somehow found myself with the responsibility of leading the team around China with my amateur-level spoken Mandarin. We often ate at a small noodle shop next to our accommodation, which I later realised was a Northern Chinese hand-pulled noodle shop. The owners were a small Uyghur family who were overwhelme