Tag: pesto
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Welchy Makes Jamie Oliver’s Flaky Pastry Pesto Chicken
I watched Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients show on TV last night and when I saw this dish I walked straight into the kitchen and wrote it on the shopping list for tonight.
Divine is all I can describe it as.
It’ll be hard to eat green beans any other way once you try this simple but deliciously sweet and tangy dressing…who knew a side dish could be such a star!
Ingredients
- 4 chicken breasts
- 400g beans
- 400g vine cherry tomatoes
- 2 sheets butter puff pastry
- 4 heaped teaspoons basil pesto (perhaps try Bish’s Basil Pesto)
Method
- Heat oven to 220 degrees fan forced.
- Trim chicken breasts and pound with your first (or a mallet) until the thick end is the same as the tail end.
- Place chicken breasts on a tray and top with a teaspoon each of basil pesto. Spread the pesto so it covers all of the chicken breast.
- Place each sheet of pastry on the board and cut into half lengthways, and then width ways into four strips about 1-2 inches wide.
- Drape the strips over the pesto chicken, overlapping the edges slightly, and then tuck the excess in underneath. Don’t go too far under as the pastry will just so soggy.
- Brush with oil and place in the oven on the top rack
- In another oven tray place the vine cherry tomatoes. Drizzle with oil, season with salt and pepper, and place in the oven on the bottom rack.
- Cook both the chicken and the tomatoes for 20 minutes.
- Meanwhile, trim the beans and add to boiling water. Cook for 7 minutes, drain and set aside.
- Remove the cherry tomatoes from the oven and transfer to a board to cool slightly.
- If the pastry hasn’t quite puffed/browned, turn oven to Grill for 5-10 minutes but be sure to watch so it doesn’t burn.
- Transfer half the tomatoes to a board and cut into servable portions (4-6 tomatoes per vine). With the other half, remove the vine and squash in the tray to release all the juices. Add a small splash of red wine vinegar, pinch of salt and pepper and stir to create a dressing.
- Toss the beans through the dressing and we are ready to serve!
- Place a bunch of the dressed beans on the plate and top with the pastry chicken. Balance the vine tomatoes off to the side and serve as is or with potato gems.
Hope you like it,
Welchy
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Bish’s Basil Pesto Experiment 1
I have two large planter boxes at the edge of our patio that are where I grow my herbs, along with a long thin veggie patch against a fence. Luckily this space is enough for me to play around with some different herbs and veggies.
Giving the long thin veggie patch a bit of a spruce:
Lately we’ve had a surfeit of basil in one of the planter boxes (the other is full of mint) and after some prompting we decided we’d have a go at making pesto.
After picking and washing a heap (and returning a few little spiders back to the patch) we decided we’d try to make a couple of varieties.
The first one we started with basil in a stick blender attachment, and poured in olive oil. It mulched the basil more than anything else, but as we added pine nuts it started to blend down a bit more. Adding some spring onions as a test didn’t help with the mulch-like consistency, though. That wasn’t a great experiment, especially when I didn’t close the blender attachment properly and got it all over myself, the kitchen bench and floor…
The second batch started with four cloves of garlic, and some olive oil. This went into a nice creamy paste quickly, and we added some more pine nuts and then started to add in some basil. This created a much creamier pesto, which went a vibrant light green pretty quickly. Unfortunately, 4 cloves of garlic is a bit much… it’s more like a garlic sauce.
On an earlier trip out that day I’d bought a couple of flip-top seal jars, and after they’d been washed and dried out I loaded up the basil into one each.
I was pretty chuffed with this, but anywhere where there is air (you can see the bubbles) went brown within minutes . I had poured some oil on top to help seal it away from the air but didn’t think about these little air pockets.
A week later we’ve been using the pesto in various dishes (pasta, mainly) but each time we have to scoop out the unsightly brown bits. It’s a bit of a pain, but it doesn’t take away from the taste. The next trick we will try is to blanche the basil and dry it before we turn it into pesto – this should help as the heat will destroy the enzymes that react with oxygen to cause the brown discolouration.
It’s not like we don’t have heaps more basil to test it on, anyway…
Bish
Related Links:
- see more of Bish’s posts here
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