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

Cookbook Review: The Silver Spoon

The Silver Spoon cookbook

This week is Italian week. Maybe not anywhere else, apart from our little flat in East London, but I have made this declaration on receiving a copy of The Silver Spoon. This 1200+ page book is supposedly the ‘bible of authentic Italian cooking’ and has only been fairly recently translated into English. So far, I’m loving it. I wouldn’t suggest buying it for the pictures – they definitely went for an ‘authentic’ look, rather than an appetizing one. And maybe those who complain the ingredient amounts are off in this translation are right (I don’t cook exactly to recipes, so I couldn’t say), but it does has a wealth of ideas and information.

Pasta alla Carbonara

One of the best things about having friends stay is that you learn new ways to cook old things. Spaghetti alla carbonara was one of the first main meals I learnt to cook. And I was very proud that it wasn’t done in the usual Australian style, with each strand coated with gluggy, heart-attack-inducing cream. Most recipes I’d tried felt as though something was missing. And as I learnt last night, what better way to fix a dish, than to add masses of heart-attack-inducing cheese.

Pasta alla Carbonara