Spring chicken crowd pleaser

You know those weekends when the hoards descend and you need an easy and tasty recipe?  I have such a recipe.  I rarely share main course recipes because I'm not very good at savoury dishes and I rarely find something worthy of a blog.  This recipe deserves to be posted.

I'll give you the ingredients for four people but it's easy to make more, pan sizes permitting.

Ingredients

• 1 onion
• 500g chicken - the recipe says boneless, skinless chicken thighs but I don't think it matters if the joints are chicken breast or if they still have the skin on but chicken breasts should be cut in two
• 300g small new potatoes
• 425ml veg stock (from stock cube)
• 350g broccoli, cut into small florets
• 350g spring greens (I substituted french beans as my children wouldn't eat spring greens)
• 140g petit pois
• a bunch of spring onion
• 2 tbsp pesto (the green basil variety - I didn't have any jar pesto so I whizzed up some fresh)

Method

• Heat some oil in a pan and fry the chicken until lightly coloured.
• Add the onion and fry gently until softened.  The recipe says to do this the other way round but I can't get colour on the chicken if there's already onion in the pan.
• Add the potatoes, stock and some freshly ground pepper and bring to the boil.
• Cover and simmer for 30 mins until potatoes are tender and the chicken is cooked.
• (You can freeze at this point if you want to.)
• Add the broccoli, spring greens (french beans), petit pois and spring onions, stir well and return to boil.
• Cover then cook for 5 mins.
• Stir in pesto and heat through.
• Serve.

You can choose different green veg for this dish but the size of the veg needs to be small enough to cook in about 5 mins.

It's the pesto that makes this dish special and it really is easy to make (and there's not much washing up either).