Chicken and green stuff casserole

This is what I like to call "Pretend health food". You start with a bunch of super healthy ingredients - in this case chicken breasts, peas, broccoli and green beans - and then you entomb them in deliciousness.

Start by throwing the three different kinds of green stuff into the bottom of something ovenable and casserolific.  The beans and peas can come straight out of the freezer, and follow up with the roughly chunked broccoli.  Then cut some chicken, onion and garlic, and grate as much cheese as your arteries permit.  Brown the surface of the chicken in a super hot pan for just a minute or two, then toss the chunks straight onto the green stuff.

Lower the heat, fry the onion and garlic a bit, then add some extra oil and a couple tablespoons of flour.  There should be roughly equal amounts of fat and flour for this.  Yes, it looks horribly unhealthy, but trust me.  Then lower the heat again and add a cup or so of milk, a cup or so of chicken stock and a decent pour of white wine. Start with something other than the milk so curdling isn't a problem and add slowly at first - pour, stir it in, pour again, etc.  Should take a minute or two to get everything in there.  Then add half the cheese and some herbs (I went with sage and a little thyme) and simmer it until everything's smooth. It should have thickened up quite a bit from the starch and cheese.  It should be a little thicker and taste a little stronger than what you want the final result to be - water is going to come out of the veg during cooking.

Pour roughly over the casserole and smear to coat.  Follow with the other half of the cheese and sprinkle with breadcrumbs.  Throw it all in the oven for half an hour.

Eat.

Get more.

Eat.

Hey, it's lean chicken breasts and no less than three (3!) different kinds of green stuff. What could be healthier?

Macadamia pesto chicken pasta

Arise, long-silent blog of old, to walk again amongst the kingdom of man!

So, Steph and I haven't really made much in the way of novel foodstuffs in the last little while, being quite content to cook things already found within the archives of this place, but I thought I should post a few things that were somewhat more adventurous.  To start: Macadamia pesto!

Thanks to our herbaceous planting session a month or so ago, we're now suffering from a pleasurable condition known informally as "all of the basil". Despite not having any pine nuts or a blender, I decided to attempt to remedy this through pesto.

I very-finely-chopped two metric tons of basil, a good few handfulls of raw macadamias and a clove of garlic.  This all took a while, but would be so much quicker with the correct equipment. To this I added a handful of good quality parmesan cheese (the label should say "parmegiano reggiano"!) and a few good lugs of good olive oil.

I browned some chicken, mixed the pesto with it after taking it off the heat, and cooked some fettucine while all this was happening.  Top with a few whole maccas and some cherry tomatoes, and consume!