All this bad weather has given me more time to cook and I've been busy! I made this lovely pasta dish the other day, inspired my my friend Lindsey's dislike of spring greens (how can someone not like their lovely sweet fresh flavour?). Because she doesn't like them, she passes them on to me to use ("for the guinea pigs", but I can't resist eating them all myself, sorry George and Freddie!). In this dish, I thought I'd try crisping up the greens, like you can with kale. It didn't work as well as I was hoping, but because I added quite a bit of salt to the crispy greens, they were an unusual seasoning for the pasta.
Spring green pasta with chicken
Serves 2
Half a red onion
A knob of butter
1 tsp caraway seeds
One small bunch of spring greens
100g linguine pasta
2 chicken breasts
zest of one lemon
1 tsp oregano
Pop the knob of butter in a small saucepan and allow to melt over a low heat. Add the caraway seeds and stir so they are coated and start to release their flavour. Finely chop the red onion and add to the pan. Sweat the onions in the butter mixture.
Finely slice the spring greens and add half (keep the rest for later) to a bowl with a teaspoon of olive oil and half a teaspoon of salt. Mix well, then spread out on a baking tray and place under a hot grill. Keep an eye on greens to make sure they don't burn! They'll probably cook within a 3 minutes; keep moving them around. I found the brown crispy bits (almost burnt, but not black!) most tasty. Take them out once they're done and set aside.
Now start cooking the pasta – add to a pan of salted boiling water.
Hammer out the chicken breasts with a rolling pin to flatten them (they cook more evenly if they're the same thickness all the way through). Press the lemon zest and oregano on to one side of the chicken breast, and season well with salt and pepper. Fry the chicken breasts in a hot frying pan until they're browned on both sides and cooked through.
Add the rest of the spring greens to the onion and caraway seed pan and turn up the heat for a couple of minutes. Drain the pasta, leaving a couple of tablespoons of water in the pan. Add the onion, caraway and greens plus all the butter left in the pan to the pasta and stir through.
Transfer to hot pasta plates, place the chicken breasts on top and artistically balance the crispy salty greens on top.
Consume!
