Pesto Chicken with Sundried Tomatoes and Toasted Pine Nuts

This is a quick and easy meal, but tastes fantastic. Put it with some good pasta and some garlic flatbread...sorted!

You can get all chefy and make your own pesto (I will do this and show you how). But using a good pesto in a jar, this meal takes 10/15 minutes, perfect if you haven't got lots of time to cook. This for me is a fresh tasting dish and has great variety of textures from the soft chicken to the crunch of the toasted pine nuts to the juicy sundried tomatoes.

Serves 4

INGREDIENTS:

A Jar Of Good Quality Pesto

Two Breasts of Chicken (from a quality Butcher)

50g Pine Nuts

300g Good Quality Pasta (I use: Tesco Finest Pennoni Rigati)

Sundried Tomatoes

Hand Full of Fresh Basil Leaves

Extra Virgin Olive Oil


WHAT TO DO:

In pan bring to the boil a pan of water and cook the pasta,

HANDY TIP:

Put some olive oil and salt in the water when cooking the pasta (the oil stops the pasta sticking to each other and the pan and the salt flavours the pasta while cooking). You want a slight bite to the pasta...nothing worse then sloppy mushy pasta!

Heat your frying pan on a medium heat and add a splash of oil. Cut your chicken into strips and then half (use chunky bits of chicken as you want that succulent texture, don't cut them to thinly) and brown in the pan for around 10 minutes... REMEMBER: chicken should not be pink in the middle! When the chicken is nearly browned, add the pine nuts for a couple of minutes to lightly toast them (the colour changes only slightly, be carefull not to burn).

HANDY TIP:

I'm not trying to teach you to suck eggs! but the reason for browning the meat (any meat) is that you keep the moisture inside, less chance of the meat going dry.

Once the meat is browned spoon 2 tbs of the pesto into the pan, stir in, then add some freshly torn basil leaves and 8 chopped Sundried tomatoes (again don't cut them to thinly as you want the juicy texture, halves or thirds will be perfect).

Once all components are done, drain the pasta and tip into the sauce (the Italians always mix the sauce in with the pasta, its only us Brits that have sauce on top of the pasta) and serve.

Serve with garlic flatbread...told you it was simple and easy!

Recipe by Matt Grice

Photo taken by Rach Grice