This recipe is so easy a twelve-year-old boy who loses his bus-pass four times a week could make it. He did.
It looked like he'd chopped the garlic with a spoon, wearing a blindfold. The chicken was shredded too fine, too coarse and not at all. And, he added a sacrilegious slug of Nando's Peri-Peri Sauce when my back was turned.
Despite all this, his 'rustic' sauce was ridiculously rich, jammy and piquant.
I went to go and fix it as I do when literally anyone cooks in my vicinity (this usually involves throwing in the proper amount of salt/garlic/sugar/butter when they look the other way) but on this occasion, there was nothing to fix.
I don't know where he gets it from but the boy's already a cocky little fucker, so I told him the sauce was just OK - a solid 5.5 out of 10. In reality it was an easy 8 and I would have been very happy had it been served to me at our local Italian restaurant.
Spaghetti with Chicken, Tomatoes and Olives
~ serves 4 ~
Ingredients
1-2 cups of leftover cooked chicken, shredded
1 x 400g tin of cherry tomatoes
4 cloves garlic, finely sliced
half a cup of pitted green olives, halved
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 sacrilegious slug of chilli sauce - preferably the vinegary variety
500g spaghetti
Method
Fry the sliced garlic in the oil over a medium heat. When the garlic's golden but not quite brown, add the tin of cherry tomatoes, salt, pepper, olives and chilli sauce.
Cover with a lid and let the sauce simmer gently for about 30 minutes - or until the oil on top turns red.
Mediterranean Medicine
Tomatoes contain a powerful antioxidant, lycopene. Cook those tomatoes in extra virgin olive oil until the oil turns red, and your body will be able to absorb a shitload more of that sweet, sweet lycopene. Reams of research have proven that lycopene reduces inflammation, some kinds of cancer and heart disease. More importantly, everything tastes better when it's swimming in extra virgin olive oil.
Add the shredded chicken and gently fold it into the sauce.
Continue simmering with minimal stirring (you don't want the chicken to disintegrate) for 5 minutes. You might need to add splash of boiling water to loosen the sauce - so it looks like my pretty pictures.
I'm presuming you're not a twelve-year-old boy who loses his bus-pass every day, so I'm not going to tell you how to cook your pasta al dente. I will however remind you to save a cup of the starchy pasta water before you drain it.
Drain the pasta and return it to the cooking pot. Add the sauce and half a cup of the pasta water, stirring over the heat until the pasta is coated and the chunky bits are well dispersed.
