Tagliatelle with chicken from the Venetian ghetto
Tagliatelle with chicken from the Venetian ghetto
After another chicken-saturated weekend, I am making chicken once again on Sunday. For the first few months after Chris and I moved in together we went through a period of only eating roast dinners on Sunday. I am pleased to say that we have since moved on from that, and although I sometimes do still enjoy a Sunday roast, I am more than happy to cook something very different. Hence, this Sunday recipe for tagliatelle. Because this recipe is intended to be a meal in its entirety, “without a procession of courses, just food on the table, and not necessarily much notice in which to plan or cook it,” I am not serving anything with it; it is to be eaten alone as a kitchen supper in its entirety.
You may notice, if you look at the index in HTE, that this is the penultimate chicken recipe. How exciting! As I have said before, I am really looking forward to finishing the chicken section and am pleased to be nearly there. After I make the tarragon French roast chicken, I want at least a month’s break from poultry of any kind! Rather, my meat will be of the red variety (I’m thinking steak, pork and lamb!).
I do actually already know a little about this recipe. I read somewhere – although it eludes me now from where – that this recipe is Nigella’s second most tested recipe from all of her books (the clementine cake being the most popular). The first time I encountered it was on the nigella.com forum, where Laura mentioned that her boyfriend was appalled at her pulling to pieces a beautifully fat and gorgeous whole roasted corn-fed chicken, only to use the shreds in a pasta dish! By the way, if you do get the chance, please check out Laura’s blog (www.hungryandfrozen.blogspot.com), it really is a wonderful read and Laura cooks a lot of gorgeous food (plus more than a few of Nigella’s recipes). However, this recipe also has special resonance for me. When Chris and I first moved into our flat, we were left on the first night, boxes piled up and no cooking equipment anywhere to be found; we couldn’t even find any money, which had been packed safely away somewhere. I managed to find £3.00 from somewhere and sent Chris off to Tescos to get something for dinner. He brought a whole -massive and greasy - pre-roasted chicken from the "deli" there and I ripped it to pieces and served it with the only other ingredient that I happened to have to hand; tagliatelle. Just sitting there with boxes all around us on our first night together in our new place, with literally *nothing* to hand, eating greasy and overly oily roasted chicken with lashings of eggy pasta, is a very vivid memory that I have of that time. Okay; Nigella’s version is one hundred times more sophisticated than our cheap and greasy offering, but the principle of torn up roasted chicken with tagliatelle is the same, and one that is close to my heart.
Another thing about this recipe, is that I absolutely love all of the ingredients in it. For some reason, Chris and I have a real thing about rosemary at the moment. We have been eating roasted garlic and rosemary potatoes a lot lately, which means that we usually have a few sprigs knocking about, which inevitably go into anything else that we happen to be making at the time. I also absolutely adore sultanas and I always have done, even when I was a little girl. I also *love* pine nuts, although to be honest, I love pretty much any nut.
This recipe appears in a subsection of the “dinner” chapter; “six ideas for kitchen suppers.” I have already made two of these recipes; the one-pan chicken (yum!) and the Blakean fish pie (Hmmmm….). After this recipe, I will only have three more to make; the involtini and the Irish and Spanish stews.
Oh. By the way, even though the quantities are for 4 people I am keeping them the same for the two of us. This is because I am on half-term at the moment and it would be nice to keep the leftovers for cold lunches during the day.
Ingredients: Everything is really easy to buy from pretty much anywhere. Because I brought everything on a Sunday, I was pretty limited over where to buy everything from and so in the end, I brought it all from Sainsburys. Over the last few days Sainsburys must have got their act together, because there were quite a few corn-fed organic whole chickens there. Nigella didn’t say anything about what kind of tagliatelle to buy (fresh or dried), but I have a real thing for fresh pasta, so I brought 500g of fresh tagliatelle. Everything else – oil, rosemary, sultanas – is highly accessible.
Price: The chicken, rosemary, pine nuts, parsley and tagliatelle totalled £7.93. The ingredients that I didn’t need were olive oil and sultanas (left over from the apple and walnut crumble).
(The gorgeously fat corn-fed bird; oiled and placed - breast-side down - in the roasting tray prior to roasting)
Whilst the chicken was cooking I prepared the other ingredients. By this, I mean that I chopped the rosemary needles with my mezzuluna, weighed out and soaked the sultanas, measured and toasted the pine nuts (I just shook them around in a hot, fatless pan for a few minutes, until just lightly golden brown). Luckily I didn’t need to measure out the tagliatelle, because it came in a 500g pack. I could then pretty much forget about everything and watch the “Come Dine with me” omnibus whilst the chicken was cooking.
When the chicken is ready, you get all the fun of tearing it to pieces onto a serving plate. You can either do this with your bare hands or two forks. Guess which I chose? Yep; just call me “asbestos hands” because I took great pleasure in tearing it to pieces with my bare hands in the manner of a hungry cavewoman! But it *did* feel satisfying, seeing the pile of white tender flesh and crispy burnished skin grow on the plate. There are – I see – two advantages of tearing the chicken apart yourself. Firstly, you get to include all those “naughty” bits of fat and skin and secondly you can snaffle down some cheeky bits of skin and flesh in the manner of a chef’s treat! Mwahhahaha...
Whilst the torn chicken sits on the heaving plate it is just a matter of cooking the tagliatelle (easy enough; I wont even go into it) and making the sauce, which simply involves pouring the juices from the roasting tray into a saucepan with the drained sultanas, chopped rosemary and toasted pine nuts and heating. I must admit that I was a little disappointed that there just weren’t that many pan juices. Okay, there was some; but not much. Some of the juices had burnt onto the roasting tray into a solid charred and sticky mess. I won’t moan too much about this though, because it was probably my fault for reasons that I am not technically proficient enough to explain, but ones that involve hot oil, oven temperatures and the like.
After all of that, it is just one massive assembly job, with all that “throwing together” of chicken, pasta and sauce. I found this relatively easy to do with my beach-wood serving hands. It does take a good few minutes to sift through all that heavy pasta, but it is well worth it. Don’t forget the chopped flat-leaf parsley on top!
(The chicken just out of the oven - YUM!)
I think that we would both have to agree though, that this meal looked wonderful. Believe me when I say that it does make a bloody lot. I used a big silver paella dish, smuggled into the UK for us by Chris’s parents after a Spanish holiday, because I didn’t feel that any of our serving plates would be big enough. I was right. There is absolutely *tons* of chicken and a massively heavy tangle of pasta – so be warned! We have tons of leftovers which don’t even fit into a bowl, so are currently languishing in a huge saucepan in our fridge! But it is a very pretty meal though. The yellow eggy pasta looks beautiful with the white and golden chicken nestled within its folds. The plump sultanas and lightly toasted pine nuts also look gorgeous peeping out of the golden creases of the pasta.
I also thought that this meal tasted really super. I loved the chicken. Once again, the flesh was tender, moist and luscious and the skin was crispy, brown and burnished. I loved the fact that the skin and those naughty fatty bits were included in this meal. Usually, in chicken and pasta meals, the chicken is just a shadow of its roasted and burnished self – there are not enough dry and stringy pieces of white meat, at best. However, this was the Mac-daddy of chicken pasta meals. Yes, there was the tender flesh, but also the crispy golden skin and those fatty and oily globules! It made me feel as though this meal really was an extravagance – but a greatly welcomed and necessary one nonetheless.
The pasta was lovely and I am so glad that I brought fresh, because it really did taste fresh, eggy and tasty. As expected, the heavy, almost eggy stodge, of the pasta went perfectly with the tender and light poultry. Because of the freshness of the pasta, it was lubricated nicely by the sauce, which made it aromatically infused with the herbiness of the rosemary. I would have liked it if the pasta was slightly “wetter” and thus if there had been slightly more sauce. Perhaps because I had roasted the chicken for slightly longer than specified, some of the juices had burnt up in the roasting tray, so perhaps it would be an idea to include more oil next time (or perhaps a little butter too). However, I mustn’t complain about the sauce, because it was truly lovely. The oily juices infused with the herbiness of the rosemary, gave everything an almost-aromatic heady flavour, redolent of the almost sweet herbiness of the rosemary, so reminiscent of my mum’s small herb garden right outside my bedroom window when I was little. I would never have thought of adding rosemary to a sauce for pasta before, and indeed it still sounds bizarre to me now, but let me assure you; it worked very well and made a wonderful aromatic addition to all of those wonderful carbs. I absolutely adored both the sultanas and the pine nuts. The sultanas were juicy, moist, tender and sweet and the pine nuts were crunchy, oily and nutty little bites of loveliness.
There were so many flavours and textures on the plate that it really was a joy to eat and it is such a great twist on simple "pasta with meat" recipes. Indeed, because of the ease of execution and general deliciousness, I am sure that it will become a regular meal in this house. Like I say, Chris didn’t like it very much, so I wouldn’t cook it again for him. I will certainly cook it again and again for me though, not least because the leftovers are absolutely heavenly. I had two big bowls of this for my lunch today and let me assure you; they were fabulous. Top tip: Try a cold bowl of leftovers with a big dollop of mayonnaise. The mayonnaise lubricates the heavy tangle of pasta again and of course is best friends with any white meat. YUM!
(The entire chicken - meat, skin, fat and all - torn to pieces on the serving plate)
Quite a difference of opinion there and I only wish that I could be more knowledgeable as to why two people who usually share a lot of food preferences, disagreed so much about this meal. Certainly, I can’t understand why Chris couldn’t taste the rosemary, as I felt that it infused the whole meal with its own aromatic and heady notes. Quite frankly, you will have to make it and let us know who you agree with (hint; me!).
(Making the sauce; roasting juices, drained sultanas, chopped rosemary needles and pine nuts)
But as I say, there *will* be a next time. Despite Chris, I liked this and will be making it again. There is no point roasting a whole chicken for me alone, so I will borrow a tip from a friend and roast just some chicken thighs for myself, in place of the whole chicken.
Rating: I rate this 5/5 (of course) and Chris rated it 2/5, therefore it receives 3 ½ /5, which in my opinion is quite undeserved. In my opinion, it deserves a much higher rating.
Labels: Chicken
