A midweek favourite, simple, and easy to prepare. I like to top this with with generous amounts of fresh basil (ie: 5- 10 leaves per bowl), because I happen to have plenty at hand from a recent gardening venture, but you can top with any fresh herb of your choice – parsley, or oregano would also go nicely, as would rocket leaves.
Preparation time: 15 minutes Cooking time: 25 mins
Serves 4
Ingredients
- 1/2 a pumpkin diced into 1cm (0.4 inches) cubes
- 500mL (16.9 fluid ounces) chicken stock or veal stock
- single chicken breast fillet (about 300g (10.6 ounces) chicken)
- 1 can white beans, drained and rinsed till there is no more froth bubbling up in your strainer. (You can cook them yourself, but this requires planning ahead, mostly we buy multiple cans on shopping day so it doesn’t seem like too much effort adding the healthy part to the meal when it comes down to it!!)
- 10 sage leaves
- 1 cup dry white wine
- 2 garlic cloves
- A few cherry tomatoes (optional – but nice!)
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 1 packet pasta – we like this one with fettucini or penne
Directions:
- Cover the pumpkin cubes with the stock, add one chopped garlic clove, the cherry tomatoes halved and the sage leaves and roast at 200 °C (392 degrees Fahrenheit) for 20 minutes or until soft
- Meanwhile, slice the chicken into thin strips
- Finely chop or crush the second garlic clove
- Put 4-6 Litres of water in a large pot and bring to the boil, with about a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon olive oil.
- Put the oil and garlic in a heated heavy based fry pan. (Heating the pan before adding the oil prevents the oil from burning and reduces the smoke!)
- Before it starts to brown, quickly add the chicken and stir a few times. Allow to brown, stirring intermittently.
- When the liquid starts to disappear and the pan starts to brown, deglaze the pan by adding a small amount of liquid (like a splash of white wine or stock). While you are at it, check the pumpkin, if the pan has gone dry, it could do with a little more moisture too (otherwise your pasta sauce will be dry too)
- The water should be boiled by now, so add the pasta and check the clock. Al Dente pasta is lower GI then sloppy pasta because you need to do just a little more work to digest it, so keep that in mind when timing the cooking according to the directions on the packet you bought.
- Stir the drained lentils into the chicken
- Remove the cooked pumpkin from the oven, semi mash it with a fork (I leave about half solid and about half mashed), and then stir into the chicken mix.
- Mix the pasta sauce into the cooked pasta and serve.
The first pea! | Libby Warne's blog // Jun 30, 2009 at 10:13 pm
[...] basil was particularly prolific, and makes a great topping for this pumpkin and sage pasta recipe I just posted on my recipe pages! Basil (foreground left), garlic Shoots (foreground right), parsley [...]
I've always wanted to know whether wine adds to the GI in a recipe or is it ok?
Well I'm glad you asked that Ellie, because I actually hadn't thought of wine as potentially high GI. Of course it does contain calories and people talk about alcohol causing weight gain (what with all the low carb beers coming out its very confusing). So I looked it up and found out at the official GI site here: http://www.glycemicindex.com/faqprint.htm In fact, wine has very little carbohydrate at all, though beers do have some. Even beer only contains 3-4 g per 100g, so their recommendation is not to drink lots of it!! So wine in cooking would be absolutely fine in terms of the GI effect. The link also has the answers to other common questions about GI, so check it out!
I like your website. I would like to see your gardening venture photos, too. (Mia: 4 years)
Thanks Mia, I'm very glad you like the recipes! I didn't realise that
kids would be reading my site too but I'm very happy about that! You
have given me a great idea, maybe soon I will add a section especially
for kids with an interest in cooking who want to learn more about
making delicious food. Because this is a new website, and lots of hard
work to set up, I've taken down the website with the gardening
pictures on it temporarily because I don't have time to do both, but
maybe I'll post some photos of home cooked vegetables here soon too!
Happy cooking!
You have a lot of reciepes that use pumkin. I thought that pumkin was a high GI food?
Hi Jill, thanks for bringing this up. According to the GI website butternut pumpkin has a GI of 51 and a GL of 3. Another recording of 'pumpkin' with no type specified, cooked in salted water was GI 75 and GL of 3. So while it has a medium to high GI… (and baked I would guess the answer would definitely be high as the starches get broken down by the baking process); there is actually very little carbohydrate in pumpkin overall, and lots of fibre and nutrients. (GL 3 means a very low load on your pancreas per serve – so the starches/ sugars get absorbed and hit your blood stream quickly (GI) but there is less sugar/ starch overall to absorb(GL)). For comparison, baked potato has a GI of between 70-100 depending on the type of potato and the length of cooking, but has a GL (glycemic load) of 19. Another good comparison to think about is cadbury chocolate: a GI of 49 and a GL of 14 – so low GI, but high GL — so more sugar, more slowly absorbed – eventually your pancreas still has to process it.
On their Frequently asked Questions part of the site at <a href="http://www.glycemicindex.com/” target=”_blank”>http://www.glycemicindex.com/ the Sydney University GI team suggest:
"Some vegetables like pumpkin and parsnips appear to have a high GI. Does this mean a person with diabetes should avoid eating them? Definitely not, because, unlike potatoes and cereal products, these vegetables are very low in carbohydrate. So, despite their high GI, their glycemic load (GI x carb per serve divided by 100) is low. Vegetables contain only small amounts of carbohydrate but loads of micronutrients and should be considered as "free foods". Eat them all you like!"
We decided we would follow this advice, but always add in a very low GI food with it – like beans or lentils, to fill us up before we eat too much!
I hope this helps!