What to Cook Tonight #72

Three lip-smackingly delicious recipes to add to your spring repertoire — Date Night Chicken & Potatoes, Bucatini with Anchovy Butter & Pangrattato, and Roasted Fennel with Beans & Olives.

We are so excited about this week’s recipes — super simple and packed with flavour, these are joyful, generous dishes, designed to be loved and shared.

This week’s pantry revolves around butter and olive oil, garlic, lemon, chilli, parsley, rosemary, and anchovies (we have an option for the non-anchovy eaters, don’t worry). These simple, tasty ingredients work harmoniously together to create beautiful depth of flavour in your three dishes.

We’re going to make an Anchovy Butter that we will use in two of our recipes. Compound butters are essentially flavoured butters — softened butter mixed with seasonings and aromatics of your choice, and are a decadent, elegant way to elevate your home cooking.

As we touched on in an earlier newsletter:

Compound butters seem to be all the rage right now — they were big in the 80s, and like all food trends, they have since come back around. Originating in France (the land of butter-based cooking) these mixtures use the fat in butter to soak up and carry the flavours of your added ingredients, resulting in a delicious flavour and mouth feel (that deeply satisfying yummy taste).

Whilst olive oil is usually our fat of choice, there is a time and a place for a butter… and that time is now. When eaten mindfully and as a treat, a butter-heavy dinner can really hit the spot like nothing else.

Here we’re going to soften butter and mix it with finely chopped anchovies, garlic, and chilli flakes. If you’re making both the chicken and the pasta, we suggest doubling the recipe. Anchovy Butter can be made in bulk, rolled into a log in a piece of waxed paper, stored in the fridge for a couple of weeks, or frozen.

Don’t be deterred by the anchovies, they melt down into nothing and provide a lovely backbone of umami flavour. Anchovies are also a great source of omega-3 fatty acids, and are usually a more sustainable choice than other oily fish. If you’re still not convinced, you can make a Lemon & Garlic Butter — use the finely grated zest of a lemon in place of the anchovies.

For more compound butter inspiration, check out Thomas Straker’s All Things Butter.

We are also going to make a crunchy pangratatto to sprinkle over the pasta and the fennel. You know how we love a crunchy breadcrumb — again, if you’re making both of these dishes we suggest you double the recipe. Once toasted, pangrattato will keep in a sealed container somewhere cool and dry (like the back of your pantry) for a few weeks. We suggest to line your container with a paper towel to absorb excess oil.

Midnight Bucatini with Anchovy Butter & Pangrattato

Which leads us to our first recipe for you — Midnight Bucatini with Anchovy Butter & Pangrattato. The perfect thing to make when it’s late, you’re tired, and it seems like there is nothing in the pantry.

Decadent, unctuous, and deeply delicious, velvety bucatini is laced with three southern Italian workhorses — garlic, chilli, and anchovy. The pasta water clings to the butter to create a luscious creamy sauce, and it all comes together wonderfully. Garnished with fresh lemon and parsley for a bright finish, and a crispy crunch of pangratatto (optional, but recommended).

It’s hard to go wrong with pasta, butter, anchovies, chilli, garlic, and lemon. If you are a fan of aglio al olio or vongole, then you will love this recipe.