Autumn in Tuscany. Chicken with courgettes, tomatoes and black olives, cooked on a wood-fired cooker

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I am in Italy at the moment and one of the (many) things I love – and probably why so many Italians do cook – is that the fruit and vegetables are so good that my cooking becomes very simple:  chop things up; add salt, pepper, a bit of olive oil and the odd herb, and sauté them a bit. It makes pretty much anything delicious. If you use a drizzler rather than a watering can for the olive oil it does very well on low-calorie-density.

I also love their scrawny yellow chickens – both the flavour and texture are unlike anything you can find in England – and they do very well with the chuck-things-in-a-pan treatment.  As I love the skin of the chicken best I do not remove it, but I off-set that with making everything else as LCD as possible.

The sunshine has been so amazing that I have been thinking of retraining as a lizard, but luckily by the evening, things have cooled down so I can indulge in one of my

favourite reasons to be in Italy in November:  I can cook supper on my wood-burning cooker. I am a complete stove-aholic (and a serious nerd on the subject), and I really miss stove-time in London.

This is so simple that it hardly counts as a recipe, but it’s very good. Use whichever bits of the chicken you like best, but for the sake of simplicity, I stipulate thighs.

Chicken with courgette, tomato, and black olives

Serves  2

• 4 chicken thighs
• 4 courgettes, diced
• 2 good handfuls of cherry tomatoes, roughly chopped
• 2 cloves of garlic, crushed
• ½ a red chilli, finely sliced
• 20 black olives
• 4 teaspoons olive oil
• A sprig or two of rosemary
• Salt and pepper

1. Put a teaspoon of oil in a sauté or frying pan. Heat it till the oil covers the whole of the base.
2. Season the chicken with salt and pepper and chuck in the pan with a sprig of rosemary. Cook for 20 – 30 minutes, turning it over halfway.  
3. Put the diced courgette in a bowl, season with salt and pepper, add a couple of teaspoons of oil, and mix really well with your hands.  
4. Heat a teaspoon of oil in another pan until it covers the bottom, and add the courgette. Sauté it on a moderate heat until it’s browned a little.
5. Put the chopped tomatoes in a bowl and season really well with salt and pepper – and perhaps a pinch of sugar.   Add the garlic, chilli, and black olives and mix well.  
6. Turn the heat up, and add them to the courgette.
7. Cook on a moderate to high heat until most of the liquid has gone and the tomatoes have intensified.

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Serve on a bed of lentils, cooked with coriander and cardamom seeds and black peppercorns – and plenty of salt at the end of cooking – and  a really good green salad.  

Diva Notes

Cooking the chicken separately

I want the skin to be crispy so I cook the chicken in a separate pan. If you are not eating the skin or aren’t so obsessed with it being crispy, you can cook it all together.

Wood-burning stove

You have probably been admiring my wood-burning cooker. If not, please don’t say so; I am very much in love.  It looks and cooks like an Aga, but it’s a Thornhill eco-range cooker. It’s not only a fantastic bit of cooking kit, but instead of wringing my hands over the running costs and my contribution to global warming, I buy my wood from my lovely farmer neighbour, Roberto, and feel very eco-smug.

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