Spaghetti with Asparagus, Peas and Mushrooms

Simple recipe this one, but so tasty...

Ingredients (serves 4)

1-2 bunches of asparagus (the thinner the better)

a few mushrooms (chopped)

some peas

2-3 spring onions, chopped

chilli flakes

olive oil

butter

white wine

salt

500gr spaghetti

Wash the asparagus and cut off the harder part of the stem if it feels too hard to cook. Alternatively you can slice the harder part right through the middle. Cut the asparagus in pieces of roughly 2cm each (that's less than an inch you imperials).

In a frying pan, heat some olive oil and toss in the asparagus. Add butter, peas, spring onions and chilli flakes. Cook for 4-5 minutes, drizzle some white wine, add the mushrooms and salt. Turn the heat down and cover, allowing it to cook gently for another 5 minutes or so. In the meantime...

In a saucepan add water, salt and bring to the boil. Add your spaghetti and cook for as long as you like-preferably the time advised on the pack.

Drain the pasta, return it to the saucepan and tip your asparagus sauce in. Mix gently and serve with some nice parmesan cheese. I use mature anari, a Cypriot cheese. Drink the rest of the wine with it :-)

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How to make the most of a chicken

(apologies to my vegetarian fans :-) )
I bought a chicken from the butcher the other day. I chopped the chicken into the following pieces:
2 legs/thighs
2 breasts
2 wings
2 back pieces

Using these I made a number of dishes. Firstly, I shallow fried (with minimal olive oil) the 2 legs/thighs and breasts, adding garlic, onions, celery, carrots, chilli flakes, cinnamon powder, nutmeg, salt and pepper. I threw in a bit of white wine, some mangetout/sugarsnap peas and then added a pack of passata tomato sauce (a can of tomato will do) with some water and let it simmer covered for about 40 minutes.

Secondly, for baby Blackbeard, I put the wings and back pieces into a saucepan and boiled them with broccoli and carrots for about 30 minutes. This of course created a nice chicken broth.

I took two cups of the broth and mixed them with two cups of cous cous to accompany the chicken. Taking some more broth I boiled some star-shaped pasta for baby. I boned some of the chicken I boiled, mashed broccoli and carrot and mixed it with the pasta. She loved it.

So, from one chicken we have all these dishes. The tomato sauce that stayed from the chicken and peas made a lovely pasta sauce. We mashed and froze the boiled chicken and veg in baby portions. We kept the remaining broth in ice cube sachets to cook with in the future. Not bad eh?

Ingredients
1 whole chicken
2 packs of sugarsnap peas
2 stalks of celery
3 carrots (2 for the chicken and peas, 1 for the baby food)
1 broccoli
2 cloves of garlic
1 onion
ground cinnamon
ground nutmeg
black pepper
salt
2 cups of cous cous
a handful of star shaped pasta