Parsley recipes

A bright, intensely green pesto built entirely around a generous heap of fresh parsley, blitzed with toasted walnuts, capers, garlic, and lemon. It coats pasta in minutes and tastes far more sophisticated than the effort involved. This is the dish to make when your parsley is bolting and you need to use the whole plant.

Gremolata — the classic Italian combination of parsley, lemon zest and garlic — is here worked into softened butter and pushed under the skin of bone-in chicken thighs before roasting. As the fat renders, it bastes the meat with herby, citrus-sharp butter, leaving you with burnished, crisp-skinned chicken sitting on a bed of creamy white beans that have absorbed all the cooking juices. It is straightforwardly brilliant.

Kuku sabzi is an Iranian herb frittata where the herbs are not a seasoning — they are the filling. The egg is almost incidental, just enough to hold together a dense, dark-green slab of fresh parsley, dill, and spring onions, fragrant with dried fenugreek and warm spice. It is eaten at Persian New Year for good luck, but it deserves a place on your table all summer long.

A vivid, intensely green soup that lets a full bunch of fresh parsley do all the talking. Sharp lemon and a little potato give it body without dulling the herb's grassy brightness. It is the kind of thing you make when your parsley plants are threatening to bolt and you want something genuinely impressive on the table in under an hour.