Chicken Puttanesca with Basil Pappardelle

Blondini and I had the most fabulous weekend in France avec les parents. Such delicious food was eaten (organic roast chicken - it really tasted different - and daurade royale, and amazing peaches and other fruit.. and a fantastic peach tart) and lovely wine was drunk and there was swimming and sunbathing and general chilledness. The only bad element was that as soon as we touched down in London on Sunday a cold sprang up out of nowhere. So I went to work on Monday all tragic and sniffling and was told I could leave early, which meant 9:30pm. I felt even worse yesterday so didn't go in, and spent a lovely day in bed with hot drinks, watching films. But since I was home, and since you're supposed to feed a cold (I have been using that excuse since Monday to eat absolutely everything I want - noodles, brownies, jelly tots, etc) I decided to make something easy but tasty and filling for dinner. I therefore present....

Chicken Puttanesca with Basil Pappardelle
(serves 2)

1 large chicken breast, cut into pieces (or however much chicken you think you need for two)
1 tin chopped tomatoes
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 large red chilli, finely chopped
1 tablespoon of capers, rinsed
1 tablespoon of sliced olives
2 tablespoons of chopped fresh basil (a large handful of leaves will make this amount)
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
250g fresh pasta (or I think it would be 160g dried pasta) - for this dish my preferred pasta is basil pappardelle

Cut the chicken into pieces, season, and fry in a small amount of olive oil until brown on both sides. Remove from the pan.

Heat a little olive oil in the pan and add the crushed garlic and finely chopped chilli. Fry for a few minutes, and then add the chopped tomatoes. When it is bubbling, add a little water together with the capers, olives and basil. Stir and taste for seasoning. Then add the chicken to the pan and cover the pieces with the sauce. Cook, covered, for about 20 minutes. If the sauce seems too thin (it should be quite thick), then take the lid off and reduce for a few minutes, stirring often to avoid the mixture burning on the bottom of the pan.

When you are ready, cook the pasta (if fresh, it will need only 2-3 minutes but dried pasta will need around 10 minutes). Serve the pasta with the puttanesca on the side or on top, as you wish!

Trompetti with Chicken and Wild Mushrooms

I've been dying to blog all week but I have been so busy at work that I really haven't had a minute. I've had quite a good cooking week and I don't want a huge backlog to write up (plus Blondini keeps pestering me about blogging - I think he wants to see his photos online). So I'll start with Sunday night's dinner, although there is stuff to write about the weekend too, but it will keep.

On Sunday I saw a box of maitake mushrooms in Waitrose and as we don't see them often we decided to do something with 'shrooms. So we also bought shiitake mushrooms and some plain closed cap mushrooms or whatever they are called. I threw some things together and voila...

Trompetti with Chicken and Wild Mushrooms
(serves 2)

1 large/2 small chicken breasts, cut into small pieces
Approx 100g shiitake mushrooms
Approx 100g maitake mushrooms (or any mushrooms of your choice)
5 or 6 closed cap mushrooms
A handful of dried porcini mushrooms
1 clove garlic
2 shallots
2-3 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
A little plain flour
250g trompetti or other pasta (this quantity is for fresh pasta, adjust for dried)

Start by putting the dried mushrooms into a small bowl and covering with boiling water to rehydrate them.

Next, roll the chicken pieces in the flour, well-seasoned, and then fry. Remove and keep aside.

Finely chop the shallots and fry, together with the crushed garlic. When the shallots are translucent, add all the chopped fresh mushrooms. Turn the heat down to quite low, and keep cooking, and after a few minutes, squeeze the water out of the porcini mushrooms and add to the frying pan. Keep the mushroomy water aside. After around five minutes, add the mushroom water and the balsamic vinegar to the mushrooms, put the chicken pieces back in the pan, and make sure everything is covered in the liquid. Cover and cook for around 15-20 minutes. After this, taste and season - you may also want to add some more vinegar at this stage. (If you are cooking dried pasta you will probably want to start that at this point.) Remove the lid and let the liquid reduce. When you are nearly ready, cook the fresh pasta (it will only take 2-3 minutes). Drain the pasta and add the mushrooms and chicken. Mmm... shroomily good.

Pesto Pasta Sunday

I had a lovely relaxing weekend - friends over for dinner on Friday night, more friends for lunch on Saturday, another one over on Saturday night, and then a really chilled Sunday - a bit of cooking, a friend's barbecue, watching a film.. and all to the sounds of Nigel Kennedy's violin practice coming from his house next door. It was lovely on Saturday but actually by Sunday we were a bit, "enough now, Nige" and wondering whether, if we complained, he would be given an asbo for disturbing the neighbours.

On Sunday we had one of our two traditional Sunday lunches - these are not very "traditional" in the British sense since one is egg and chips (I have scrambled eggs with fried onions, Blondini has an onion omelette or 2 fried eggs), and the other is pasta with pesto, but they are yum! We started this when we were watching the West Wing from start to finish - we liked to make our lunch and sit with it in front of as many episodes of the Wing as we could get through, and we've continued the tradition despite sadly finishing the whole thing a few weeks ago.

We had pasta this week because we wanted something really fast (no waiting for chips to cook) - I toasted a handful of pine nuts in a dry frying pan, together with a fat clove of garlic until they had turned brown, and then I added these to the food processor with a large handful of basil, some olive oil and some sea salt. I whizzed it up, put the fresh pasta in the saucepan and boiled it, and then, literally 3 minutes later, served our delicious lunch. We both hate cheese in almost all its forms but I imagine that if you like cheese you'd like some added to this dish.

Later on, while Blondini was working, I decided to make some brownies. This was really for two reasons: one, because I wanted to test out a recipe, since I have never made amazing brownies and I wanted to make some that were like the best brownies I have ever tasted, which are to be found at the Firehook Bakery in Washington DC. Two, because my grandma bought me a silicon baking tray/dish thing that wobbled a lot and I wanted to see how well it would work.
I made the recipe from the Green and Blacks chocolate cookery book, modified slightly to make a smaller quantity and decreasing the sugar content because I couldn't understand why it required so much. This excess of sugar thing is actually a common theme in many chocolate recipes - surely if the recipe contains a large amount of chocolate, it doesn't need very much sugar because chocolate is already sweetened to just the right level of sweetness and any more just makes it sickly.

My version of the recipe was -

180g dark chocolate (I used Lindt 70%)
180g unsalted butter
120g plain flour
1 teasp vanilla essence
3 eggs
100g sugar

Melt the chocolate and butter in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Meanwhile, beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla, and when the chocolate and butter is melted and cooled slightly, add to the egg/sugar mix and beat together. Sift the flour and salt together into the mix, beat, and then pour into a baking tray (which for my recipe was about 20cm x 25cm and about 10cm deep). My tray didn't require lining or greasing (the beauty of silicon) but a traditional one should probably be lined with baking parchment.

Cook at 160 (or normal baking temperature for your oven) for around 20-25 minutes, until the top is forming a crust that flakes when touched. They should be gooey inside (but not uncooked) and it is fine to take them out too early and then put them back in again if not cooked enough. Leave to cool for about 15 minutes in the tin and then cut into squares and remove.