Recipe: Chicken Pasta Toss

My wife has decided that we should eat a little lighter.  So she went digging through some of the cook books on the shelf and came up with this dish.  We did change it up slightly, but this is a dish that lends itself to substitutions.  Since garlic scapes are in right now, we decided to add some scapes to the recipe.  We also picked the peas from the garden.

Ingredients

• Bow tie pasta
• 1 medium tomato
• 1 small onion
• 1 medium zucchini
• 1 small red bell pepper
• 10 garlic scapes
• 2 large garlic cloves
• 4 chicken breasts
• 1/2 cup peas
• cooking oil
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp Italian seasoning
• 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, grated

Cut the chicken breast into 1″ chunks.  Chop the onion.  Slice the red bell pepper and zucchini.  Chop the scapes into 1″ pieces.  Seed and chop the tomatoes.

Stir frying

Cook the pasta as directed on the package.  In a large skillet, heat some oil.  Using a garlic press, crush the garlic into the oil.  Add the chicken and stir fry for about 5 minutes.

Add the onion, zucchini, garlic scapes, bell pepper, peas and seasoning.  Stir fry for a couple more minutes.  The goal is to ensure that the chicken is cooked through, but the vegetables retain that great color.  Add the tomatoes and continue heating for about 2 minutes, stirring gently until they are heated.

Toss it together

The recipe says to stir the pasta into the skillet.  But since we doubled some of the ingredients, there wasn’t room in the skillet.  But my wife has this huge stainless steel bowl.  We added pasta and the chicken stir fry mixture to the bowl.  Add 1/4 cup of the Parmesan cheese.   Toss together to combine.

Dinner is served

When serving, top the pasta with some fresh grated Parmesan cheese.  We used bow tie pasta from the Amish market.  Next time we will likely try whole wheat pasta.  This would also go really well with a crusty bread.

We will certainly repeat this recipe.  Throughout the Summer, we will substitute whatever I’m harvesting at the time.