Quick Grilled Chicken with Wild Garlic Pesto

Being a city dweller, I was lucky to receive two supremely fresh ingredients this week: wild garlic from Riverford and chicken breasts from an Oxfordshire farm (thanks to my friend, who assures me the animals were running around on Friday). So I needed a quick, simple way to put these two together. With a little inspiration, I settled on grilled chicken with wild garlic pesto.

Grilled Chicken with Wild Garlic Pesto

Pesto originates from a coastal region in north-west Italy called Liguria, an area where basil is the king of herbs. It is traditionally made by crushing garlic, salt, torn basil leaves, olive oil, Pecorino (or Parmesan) and pine nuts in a mortar and pestle (hence its name). But in an insult to the purists, I cheated and used a hand blender to save time.

Now for the chicken… to keep chicken breasts moist, the consensus is to use ‘dry’ heat for a short amount of time (grilling, frying, roasting, barbecuing) or ‘moist’ heat for a longer period of time (poaching, steaming, slow cooking, microwaving). The other option, brining, wasn’t suitable as I was after a quick meal. I decided to keep it simple and grill the chicken (mainly because I wanted to try out my newly seasoned cast iron skillet!)

Here we go… (serves 4):

• Preheat the oven to 200°C. Heat the grill pan on a high heat (until smoking).
• Drizzle 4 chicken breasts with 2 tbs olive oil and season with salt.
• Place the chicken in the pan. Leave for 1 min, then turn over. Leave for another minute, then transfer the pan to the oven for 8-10 minutes.
• Meanwhile, tear 50g wild garlic shoots and chop 2 anchovy fillets. Add 1 tbs grated Parmesan and 100ml olive oil and blend until paste-like. Add a little water if it’s too thick.
• Let the chicken rest for 5 minutes, then slice thickly and drizzle with the pesto.

The chicken ended up with a smoky flavour – perhaps not planned, but it stood up well to the strong flavour of the pesto.