Happy Monday! I was pretty surprised Nate was up to do another dish for the blog today. That’s 3 in a row! I was thinking once a week was going to be our average quota. Nate opted to do a noodle based dish today, so I persuaded him to do pasta!  Mostly because of my love for cheese and the fact that his basil plant was starting to wither. He forgot plants needed sun. After going on a quick run to Trader Joe’s after work, we were set to start cooking.

This is the recipe Nate used.

The Dish:  Chicken Pesto Pasta

Ingredients:

• A Couple of Chicken Breast
• 2 cups of Basil (or all of his potted plant basically)
• Cherry tomatoes
• Heavy Cream
• Pasta (we used linguine)
• 1/2 Cup of Parmesan Cheese
• 3 cloves of Garlic
• Olive Oil
• 1/3-1/2 cup of walnuts or pine nuts
• Salt & Pepper

Steps

Pesto Sauce

Adding tomatoes

Pesto Sauce:

• Add 1/3-1/2 cups of walnuts and 3 cloves of garlic to a food processor and pulse it a few times
• Add the basil and pulse a few more times
• Slowly add the 1/2 cup of EVOO and pulse a bit more (scraping off all the sides)
• Add the 1/2 cup parmesan cheese and pulse it yet again
• Add salt and pepper to taste

Pasta

• Boil the water and salt it accordingly to cook your pasta
• Heat the pesto in a pan with a little EVOO and stir it
• Add as much cream as you deem necessary (We ended up adding more than we originally planned to thicken it, but it didn’t turn out super creamy)
• Add some tomatoes
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• Add the pasta and mix thoroughly

Chicken

• Salt and pepper
• You can grill it or pan fry it (He used a pan, since he can’t have a grill at his apartment)
• Cook throughly
• Cut and enjoy!

Here is the final product!

Add the grilled chicken

Needs more cheese!

After the two major fails (see below), Nate’s dish actually came out as a major success! He was very impressed with himself, which he claims is hard to do. Obviously, I added more parmesan cheese to my pasta. The pasta wasn’t as heavy as I expected which is how I prefer it. It was pretty light dish overall and I loved the nutty and crunchy texture of the pesto. We paired our pasta dish with a light side salad as well to balance out the heavy carbs.

Stay tuned tomorrow for our next noodle dish!

Cooking Fails

**Please don’t be as clumsy as we were

Dropped a whole box of linguine unto the floor

Poor blue saucer