Quick chicken pesto pasta

Is it Tuesday today? Confused.com of Windsor. Yesterday (being Monday) I felt it was Tuesday and today (being Tuesday) I felt it was more like Monday. If I go back to the Tuesday feeling tomorrow I know I’m stuck in some kind of weird time warp loop.

Luckily I’ve got an extremely quick and easy dinner to cook tonight, and one which always puts a smile on David’s face. We’re having chicken pesto pasta. Just cook some pasta and while you’re doing that fry up some chopped pieces of chicken. Tip the cooked chicken into the drained cooked pasta, add a jar of pesto, stir well and serve in deep pasta bowls with lots of Parmesan over the top. Takes about 15 minutes tops. Simples!

When I lived on my own I often used to make a veggie version of this. I just added a chopped leek and a chopped courgette to the boiling pasta water and then drained the pasta and veg and stirred through the pesto. I used to have a really pretty, deep bowl with a pink and blue floral (maybe Spanish) pattern on it that I used to serve this in. The bowl was a gift for an extra task at work I’d done that was appreciated by someone who was pretty hard to please so I was so chuffed he gave me this bowl as a thank you. And in my flat I used to eat my veggie pesto pasta from this bowl while sitting on my bean bag on the floor. I’d forgotten all about my bean bag! Oh the good old days… maybe!?

I remember the first meal I ever cooked for David in my flat. It was bangers and mash. My sister had been teasing me for a while that I should get a potato masher, as above. I protested that I liked mashing them with a wooden spoon and didn’t care if they had a few lumps in. I actually really hate posh mashed potato that you get in restaurants that’s like a purée and usually far too salty. The worst I ever experienced was at one of Heston Blumenthal’s establishments “The Hind’s Head” in Bray. It was so liquid you could have poured the mash that was served with a homemade pie. Well, I’m sure Heston would hate my slightly lumpy, not very salty mash! So in preparation for the first meal I ever cooked for my husband-to-be I invested in a potato masher, my sister claiming I was weird not to have one already. As I was cooking I mentioned to David I’d bought the masher especially for the occasion and he said “oh I usually just mash it with a spoon too”. He was so unbothered about whether I used a masher or not, we had a laugh about it and I felt we were on the same page. But I have indeed used the masher ever since and find it useful for mashing other things too, so maybe my sister did have a point.

Back to 2020, last night I was a bit more adventurous on the cooking front and I made another recipe from this Gary Rhodes’ book.

I made “Sautéed chicken livers with garlic mushrooms and spinach” and here it is.

I served this with a few boiled potatoes from the garden, which are going on and on, a big harvest this year. Most of my spinach has sadly died though so I had to buy a bag of spinach. I wouldn’t grow spinach growing up a south facing wall again in pots. It didn’t seem to like it very much. But the lettuces and tomatoes are doing just fine there. Anyway, the Gary Rhodes’ dish was unanimously deemed to be delicious and I would make this again. It gets a ☑️ in the book in pencil if I have made it and then a big asterisk * next to the tick if it was really delicious. This one got a ☑️*.

Do you like my agapanthus? These tall purple flowers. I think they’re amazing. They get better every year. Bye for now. Back Thursday x