WHAT’S COOKING: Chicken and bacon pasta with peas

In essence, this is a simple one-pot family supper to which I added pasta. It’s as simple as a pasta supper gets, but the inclusion of cream and bacon do zhoosh it up a bit.

Cream is a rarity in my pasta sauces but once in a while there’s a call to use some. Bacon, on the other hand, appears in my pasta sauces often. And where there’s bacon, there are often peas too. Some things just go together.

You can serve this pasta sauce with any small pasta shape, whether farfalle (which I used), fusilli, rigatoni, conchiglie or other pasta shells.

The chicken I used was breast fillets, as convenient as it gets.

There’s red onion and garlic in it too, and if the sauce is not stretching as far as you’d like it to, a little pasta water stirred in at the end will do the trick.

Tony’s chicken and bacon pasta with peas

(Serves 4)

Ingredients

Olive oil, as needed

1 medium red onion, peeled and finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped

A small handful of thyme sprigs, picked

200 g rindless streaky bacon, diced

4 chicken breast fillets, sliced thinly

A glass of dry white wine (about 200 ml)

1 cup frozen peas

250 g farfalle or other small pasta, boiled and drained

Salt and black pepper to taste

200 ml cream

Finely grated Parmesan, to serve

Method

Boil the pasta: bring plenty of lightly salted water to a boil, plunge the pasta in all at once, and separate the pasta by stirring immediately with a wooden spoon or silicone spatula. Drain in a colander over the sink, then drizzle a little olive oil over and toss. Leave aside.

Prepare the onion and garlic. Dice the bacon. Slice the chicken breasts. Pick the leaves off the thyme sprigs.

In a large pan, heat a little olive oil, add the onion and cook gently for 3 or 4 minutes, stirring. Add the garlic and cook for another minute.

Add the diced bacon and thyme leaves and cook, stirring now and then, until the bacon crisps. Remove everything to a side dish.

Add more olive oil and fry the chicken strips in batches, so as not to crowd the pan. Add the cooked chicken to the onion and bacon.

Deglaze the pan with a glass of white wine and cook it down by about two thirds.

Add the cream and cook it down by half, slowly and gently for the flavours to enrich.

Add the chicken, bacon and all the rest back, season with salt and black pepper, then add the frozen peas (yes, frozen) and stir. Bring it to a gentle simmer and cook for 5 minutes or more while everything melds and the peas cook through.

Toss with the pasta and serve with finely grated Parmesan. DM

To buy a copy of Tony Jackman’s Retro Karoo Food (Penguin Random House) signed by the author in gold, send an email to him at tony@dailymaverick.co.za. Or buy it through the Daily Maverick shop.

Tony Jackman is twice winner of the Galliova Food Writer of the Year award.