pasta – Dad's Turn To Cook

A bit of an aside before we begin. I am a HUGE fan of a really bold and fresh tomato flavour. When the tomato POPS, I am a happy camper. This recipe pulls that off in spades.

So…after making pizza’s the other night I had an abundance of half chopped veggies kicking around in the fridge. After a bit of searching, I found a dish that seemed to cover off the bases when it comes to flavour and also burn through some of those veg in the chill box.

Chicken Cacciatore

1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breasts (basically 2 full chicken breasts – cubed)

1 tbs vegetable oil (canola / olive…really doesn’t matter)

1 sliced medium onion (you want this to be a bit of a ‘chunky’ cut)

1/2 sliced green pepper (again with the chunky cut)

1/2 sliced red pepper (…ditto with the choppin’)

2 cups sliced fresh mushrooms (if you like them. I don’t, so….hard pass)

1 tsp minced garlic

1 big can of crushed tomatoes (796ml/28fl oz)

2 tbs chopped fresh parsley (I used a few solid shakes of dry…)

1/4 tsp pepper

1 tsp salt

2 tsp italian seasoning (I went with oregano which I had on hand)

1 tsp dried basil

parmesan cheese (to sprinkle on at the table

1 package of egg noodles (I went with fusili – I had some on hand)

This one is pretty easy to pull off. Put the oil in a deep pan and cook the cubed chicken over medium heat. Once you’re done with that, remove the chicken, toss in all of the dry veggies and basically stir fry them until the onion has become translucent. Once that happens, toss the chicken back in. Add the crushed tomato and spices, cover and simmer for 15 minutes or so. Done.

In a separate pot, boil the water, cook your noodles. Drain.

Scoop some noodles onto plate, put a big hearty scoop of the chicken/veg mix on top, and then shake on some parmesan to finish (I usually grind a bit of pepper on top for the fun of it).

This one is a winner. It tastes fresh, it has pasta, there’s all sorts of veggies in there.

Budget wise? You’re looking at…

2 chicken breasts… ~$5
can of tomato… $1 if you catch a deal, $2 if you don’t
onion/peppers…$2.50
noodles…$2.50
mushrooms…$2.00
spices…negligable

All in all, you’re looking at about $14. We had company over so this one fed 4 adults, 3 kids and we still had some leftovers. I ripped up a couple heads of romaine on the side like I usually do when serving a pasta. So that was a couple bucks more. All in all? It’s going on the list! Bellissima!

Yeah, I made that.

I thought it was about time to actually share a recipe on here. After picking up an absolute killer deal on pork tenderloins at Safeway the other day (seriously, I think it worked out to about $3 each in a pack of 5) we’ll be burning through some pig.

Tenderloin is of course a very tender (hence the name) and easy to cut to cook. It’s also very lean. Doesn’t have a ton of natural flavour, we’ll get to that. Having gone through my ‘usual’ pork tenderloin recipe a few days back, I decided to shake it up and try something different and this one I found on the Kraft site was a definite winner.

Spinach Pork Tenderloin Pasta Toss

A few substitutions on my end. We used ‘regular’ parmesan cheese to finish before serving. Didn’t feel like buying a bottle of ‘shredded’ for one recipe.

I also substituted regular mustard for dijon (personal preference) and fusilli pasta instead of rotini (again, we had fusilli pasta on hand and curly pasta is curly pasta). I made more pasta then they recommended. I like pasta and it lets you stretch this a bit more.

This one worked out great. Thumbs up from all the family, even “the picky kid” who really only asked if I could make it without spinach next time. No. I can’t. Spinach totally finishes this. It feels like you’re putting a whole salad bar into the pot, but MAN that stuff will shrivel down when it finally catches the heat and starts to wilt.

This is a very soft taste on the palate and will definitely be going into our tenderloin rotation. If anything, as mentioned above, the tenderloin could stand a bit of seasoning prior to going into the pot to kick it up a bit. With the mustard/pepper/spinach already in the dish…hmm…I think I’d go for a bit of garlic and curry powder. I’ve got this recipe bookmarked so I’ll try that out in the future and document the results.

Budget:

Tenderloin (on-sale) ~ $3
Spinach (uses most of a bag) ~3
Chicken broth ~$1.50
Cream cheese ~$1

Breaking it all down, even if you don’t get a sweet deal on the protein, you’re looking at about $10. This fed our family of 5 and had a little bit left over for my Wife to take to work as leftovers. Again, add some more pasta if you want to stretch this a bit. It’s a very liquidy sauce and having some extra surface area to soak it up doesn’t hurt one bit either.

-g