Chicken And Asparagus Penne

(Original post September 8, 2012 @ mtable.wordpress.com.)

I let my husband, Matt, choose this one. He's been hassling me to cook something "with noodles" ever since I let him choose last time. Plus, I think he wanted to redeem himself after that disaster. His second choice surprised me. I was expecting him to choose one of the Asian dishes I'd pinned. Honestly, I've had this recipe pinned for a while. I think I pinned it because the picture looked so wonderful. I was less impressed with the actual recipe and would probably have never tried this one. Of course, I found out later that my husband chose because of the picture too. Let's cook!

The Pin: Chicken And Asparagus Penne by GoodnessGracious.com

Difficulty: 3 (1 = Easy, 10 = Hard)

The ingredients.

FOOD!

A few things here:

1. I used chicken thighs instead of the recommended chicken breasts. When I went to the store to pick up the chicken, the breasts were close to double the price of the thighs. Ridiculous! In general, I prefer thighs anyway, so there you go.
2. I halved everything in this recipe except the chicken. When I cook, it's typically for my husband and me. We're terrible about eating leftovers for more than a day, so I try not to cook too much at a time unless I'm going to freeze some. That and I only had 8 oz. of asparagus instead of one pound the full recipe requires.
3. The recipe itself does not tell you how to season the chicken. The blogger chose to use Lawry's. I've never tried Lawry's, didn't have it in the house, so I sort of made up my own seasoning. I used salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, oregano and parsley. Like the blogger I sauteed the chicken on the stovetop.

So basically, you cook the chicken, boil the pasta and nuke the asparagus, throw it all into a baking dish with some oil, top with cheese and broil for 5ish minutes. The recipe didn't tell me to do this, but when I put oil in the baking dish, I used the oil from the pan that I sauteed the chicken in. I thought it might give the pasta more flavor. I also added a few pinches of salt to the mix before broiling. It looks a bit like this.

Cheesy!

You know when you let your husband choose a dish and he only looks at the picture and doesn't bother reading the recipe and then is disappointed when you serve him dinner? Yeah, that sort of happened.

For me it was better than I was expecting. For Matt is was a complete disappointment. Based on the picture, he was expecting there to be a white or cream sauce. Still, it was good. Not great but good, though we both agree it felt like three separate components mixed together. The dish didn't mesh. There was nothing binding the three main ingredients together. It would have been just as good separated: a piece of chicken with a side of asparagus and cheesy pasta. The sauce that Matt was anticipating probably would have done this. Then there's the cheese. The recipe urges you to broil until the cheese is "nice and crunchy." Mine may have been more on the crunchy side than necessary, but we both would have preferred it just melty, no crunch.

So like I said. A solid good. Something to try if you're looking for something easy and different.

Final Rating: 6 (1 = Bad, 10 = Great)