Crispy Chicken, Black Kale & Chickpea Saag
A Seasonal Supper for October from Tom Jackson
ROSIE : Hello everyone! I may be away on my honeymoon but never fear, the very excellent Tom Jackson is here! I have long admired Tom’s cooking from afar. He may be co-founder and Creative Director of Twisted, but more importantly he is the owner of the most shared food instagram between my husband and I. We are always sending each other his creations exclaiming how much we want to eat them for dinner. Then, when Tom published his debut cookbook Cool Pasta earlier this year I was blown away. As someone who can be quite a traditionalist when it comes to pasta cookery, this book changed my mind. Tom’s ingenuity and culinary courage means every recipe is a knockout example of clever cooking. The book contains so much more than just pasta salad recipes - it’s a toolkit for how to make your food more exciting. So I am thrilled he is contributing a recipe this month for our Seasonal Supper.
TOM : When Rosie very kindly ask me to contribute a seasonal supper to her brilliant Substack, I immediately bookmarked cavolo nero (black or Tuscan kale or cabbage); an ingredient which heralds the return of ‘Soup Mondays’ in our house, and with it a cavolo and chickpea soup I’ve made a ridiculous amount of times over the years. Fear not, Rosie’s reader - although this is published on a Monday, I’m not giving you a recipe for my boring old soup. Strip the leaves from cavolo’s woody stems and there are plenty of awesome - and non-Italian - ways to cook with it.
Though the end result is closer to chana saag, this recipe takes cues from ‘espinacas con garbanzos’ (literally ‘spinach with chickpeas’) - a beguiling Andalusian tapa that was always a solid 10/10 during an otherwise disappointing eating experience in Seville (a bout of food poisoning, countless bank holiday closures and some ill-advised ordering should do it). Cumin and coriander seed are not spices many people would commonly associate with Spanish food, but they live in that tapa (and other dishes in the region) through historic Moorish influence. It tasted distinctly Indian to me, and each time we ate it I was transported back to Birmingham and the saag-eating experiences of my youth. I love the process of layering flavour in Indian cooking, and slow cooking greens suits me extremely well, because I like to take my time. I also like anything that I can eat with rice. So here we go. Call it a traybake, a spiced stew, an oven-baked curry. Whatever it is, it’s definitely a seasonal supper.
Notes: This is an excellent recipe for ‘sending the rice down’, so I’d recommend eating this with plain basmati rice and plenty of yoghurt. Some brinjal (aubergine) pickle and methi roti on the side would be excellent, too. You can of course use long-leaf spinach instead of cavolo and swap the chickpeas for par-boiled potatoes, and you could also omit the chicken for a quicker / vegetarian version, which you wouldn’t need the oven for. Options!
Another Note:
published Nick Bramham’s no-doubt excellent recipe for ‘spinach with chickpeas’ earlier this year - based on the version at Seville’s Rinconcillo. They had run out when we went.