Triple green veg and chicken pasta

The three green ingredients in this fairly straightforward pasta dish are asparagus, tenderstem broccoli and rocket (aka arugula). On a whim, after last night’s chantenay carrots, I decided to type in www.tenderstem.co.uk, and I kid you not, it exists. Go check it out yourself. Susan, sadly there’s no ‘sun, sea and chantenay’ tagline immediately obvious, but I suspect you’ll find enough to chuckle about.

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First of all Tenderstem is a registered trademark, so technically we should be giving them the respect their marketing budget has bought and typing it Tenderstem®. How this isn’t the same vegetable as Broccoli Rabe (aka Rapini, Broccoletti, etc) , which we Italians have been eating for years, I do not know. But it always surprises me how many things have completely different English names from one mother-tongue-country to the next. Don’t get me started on eggplant-aubergine-brinjal.

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I’m thinking the asparagus in tonight’s meal is feeling left out, not having an a.k.a of its own. I guess because it’s such an old vegetable the name just took. There is an asparagus recipe in Apicius’s recipe book (the oldest cookbook on record from the 3rd century AD). But now this is all sounding a little academic and you don’t really need to know that much about the roots (ha, pun intended) of some green vegetable’s name.

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Oh, but i can't stop now, so here’s what Wikipedia has to say about asparagus:

“The English word "asparagus" derives from classical Latin, but the plant was once known in English as sperage, from the Medieval Latin sparagus. This term itself derives from the Greek aspharagos or asparagos, and the Greek term originates from the Persian asparag, meaning "sprout" or "shoot". Asparagus was also corrupted in some places to "sparrow grass"; indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary quotes John Walker as having written in 1791 that "Sparrow-grass is so general that asparagus has an air of stiffness and pedantry". In Gloucestershire and Worcestershire it is also known simply as "grass". Another known colloquial variation of the term, most common in parts of Texas, is "aspar grass" or "asper grass". In the Midwest United States and Appalachia, "spar grass" is a common colloquialism. Asparagus is commonly known in fruit retail circles as "Sparrows Guts", etymologically distinct from the old term "sparrow grass", thus showing convergent language evolution.”

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Ahh those crazy kids in those fruit retail circles. What ever will they think of next? Enough about that, hopefully our hero the asparagus will feel better for not having a registered trademark or a proper a.k.a name.

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So tonight I sautéed some chicken, blanched the tenderstem and the asparagus and tossed it all in a little creamy white wine sauce with some cooked fusilli. I topped all of that with some fresh wild rocket, freshly shaved parmesan and a sprinkle of toasted pine nuts.

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Weightwatchers points: 13 as follows: 4 for the pasta, 3 for the chicken, 0 for the veg, 2 for the pine nuts, 1 for the parmesan and 3 for various sauce elements.