What makes this dish Mediterranean?
This broccoli pesto chicken pasta recipe is bursting with fresh, vibrant, and delicious Mediterranean ingredients. It calls for:
- Kalamata olives
- Sundried tomatoes (and cherry tomatoes)
- A delicious pesto made in part with blanched broccoli
- Olive oil (we used some that Zoe’s mom made for us from olives from the South of France)
- Lemon
- Red onion
- Garlic
- Artichoke hearts
Basically, all the best Tuscan flavors in one flavor-packed meal!
What is the Mediterranean diet?
As we’ve mentioned before, we don’t subscribe to a single restrictive diet. However, we like to loosely follow a Mediterranean-style diet. This calls for having lots of fresh plant-based foods and healthy fats (like olive oil!) in your diet (such as the ones we listed above). As this pesto chicken pasta recipe demonstrates, cooking Mediterranean recipes let you use all kinds of unique and flavorful ingredients.
Of all the diets out their, the Mediterranean diet is one that has some of the best evidence behind it. Feel free to research it more for yourself starting with this nice resource.
Tips for making this Broccoli Pesto Chicken Pasta recipe
This recipe is all about timing and multitasking. If you have multiple burners on the stove and are good at multitasking then this recipe is perfect for you!
Mise en place
At the start, we recommend preparing recipes the “mise en place” method. This means preparing all your ingredients before you start actually cooking the recipe. That way, everything is ready to go while you’re cooking and you don’t have to worry about cutting/chopping, etc. It lets you focus on the cooking itself.
In this recipe, we would recommend first cutting up all your veggies and setting them aside before you start working with the chicken (to prevent contamination from raw chicken).
Multitasking
When everything is ready to go, first preheat the oven and start heating up two pots of water and prepare the bowl of ice water. You can also start getting the zucchini, garlic, and onion ready on the baking sheet.
Then when the water is ready, you can cook your pasta in one and blanch your broccoli in the other.
Then you can poach the chicken in a leftover pot of water (perhaps from the broccoli water) as you make the pesto sauce and finish up the roasted veggies.
Finally, it’s just a matter of combining everything. See?? Easy peasy as long as you can keep an eye on everything at once (or have an extra helper in the kitchen).
How to serve/eat this pasta
This is a very versatile recipe. You can have it for brunch, lunch, dinner, or just an afternoon snack.
It’s up to you whether you prefer serving this dish warm, room temperature, or cold (we’ve had it each way and have no preference!)
When you serve it, feel free to add a sprinkle of freshly cracked pepper, some freshly grated Parmesan cheese, a few pinches of chiffonade basil, and a dash of olive oil. We also served ours with a lemon slice on the side. Of one side note, freshly cracked pepper is definitely the way to go (as opposed to the stuff that’s pre-cracked). We got into using black tellicherry peppercorns which was a complete game-changer for us in the pepper world. Bursting with flavor!
We ended up with extra broccoli pesto from this recipe. Definitely save it in the fridge! You can use it on eggs, toast, other pasta recipes, etc.
Other similar delicious Mediterranean recipes
If you liked this Broccoli Pesto Chicken Pasta recipe, be sure to check out some other good looking/good tasting/good-for-you Mediterranean recipes:
And now, at long last, here is the recipe you’ve been waiting for! Feel free to leave comments/questions below!
Mediterranean Broccoli Pesto Chicken Pasta
Ingredients
Pasta
- 3 chicken breasts poached and shredded
- 1 12 oz package farfalle pasta cooked
- 1 red onion roughly chopped
- 1 zucchini halved and sliced
- ½ cup sun dried tomatoes
- ½ cup cherry tomatoes halved
- ½ cup kalamata olives
- ½ cup artichoke hearts roughly chopped
Broccoli Pesto
- 1 large head broccoli cut into florets
- 3 cloves garlic not peeled
- 1 bunch basil
- 1 bunch parsley
- ¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese
- Salt and pepper
- 1/2 lemon zest and juice
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
- Place the zucchini, red onion, and garlic on a baking sheet and toss with olive oil and a pinch of salt. Cook for 15 minutes, turning once.
- Next, blanch the broccoli- bring a pot of water to a gentle boil and set aside an extra bowl of cold water with ice cubes. Place the broccoli florets into the boiling water for 3 minutes before transferring the broccoli to the bow with ice cold water for a few minutes. Now remove broccoli from water to dry for a few minutes and then transfer it to a blender.
- Add parsley, basil, ⅓ cup olive oil, and the roasted garlic cloves (peeled) to the broccoli in the blender. Blend and meanwhile add the Parmesan and extra olive oil as needed to make the desired consistency. Add a pinch of salt/pepper, to taste.
- In a large bowl, toss together the pasta with about ½-¾ the pesto sauce (you can reserve the rest for other recipes). You can use a few tbsp of water reserved from cooking the pasta to thin the sauce a bit (as needed). Then toss in the chicken, sun dried tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, olives, artichoke hearts, zucchini, and red onion. You can optionally top with extra lemon slices.
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