Very Easy Chicken & Mushroom Pasta

 

Just creamy enough, lots of flavour and very fast to make – this is the perfect after-work dinner. Added bonuses are:

1. you can get lots of healthy veggies into the one meal if you serve a simple salad along-side this pasta meal
2. leftovers taste great
3. everyone loves it 🙂

I used a box of multi-coloured fettuccine, just for the colour splash. Normally I would just choose ordinary egg noodle. I have to admit preferring egg noodle to “plain” pasta.

(some people prefer a thinner sauce than I usually make. If this is you, just add some chicken or vegetable stock, white wine or more cream/evaporated milk to the sauce as it’s cooking)

Here’s the recipe I used on this night. Feel free to adjust, add + subtract and generally add your own signature to this recipe, it’s a very forgiving one 🙂

CHICKEN & MUSHROOM PASTA

• 350g-400g thinly sliced chicken breast or chicken tenderloin
• some bacon or ham if you fancy it
• 1 red capsicum, washed, seeds out, white inside membrane cut-away & sliced into thin strips
• about 12, give-or-take, medium size button mushrooms
• 1 large onion sliced into fairly thin half-rings
• 3 crushed or finely chopped cloves of garlic
• 200ml of cream or evaporated milk if you’d like to reduce the fat content of the dish
• juice of a lemon or 1/2 a cup of white wine
• 1 teaspoon of Dijon mustard
• salt & pepper to taste
• 1 tablespoon of olive oil, or oil of your choice
• finely chopped chilli, celery, carrot, zucchini, sun-dried tomato, olives etc are all other things you can add to this pasta sauce

Heat the oil in a large saute or fry-pan and gently saute the onion and garlic. You want them to be very lightly coloured.

Add the chicken to the pan and cook it over medium heat until it’s cooked. No need to brown it for this recipe. Don’t have the heat too low or the chicken will “leak” a lot of water and steam rather than gently fry 🙂

Add the mushroom, capsicum and bacon/ham if you’re using it.

At this stage you can bring to the boil a large pan of salted water for your pasta.

Cook your pasta according to the packet directions. It’s usually about 4 minutes or so for fresh pasta and about 12-15 minutes for dried.

Add the cream/evaporated milk to the  chicken/veg mix, along with the wine if you’re using it ( not the lemon juice yet), the Dijon mustard  & the salt and pepper.

Now, boil it for as long as it takes for the sauce to reach your desired thickness. If it seems too thin, boil it hard. if it seems to be too thick, add some more cream or wine.

Drain the pasta in a colander and toss it into the pan with the pasta sauce. Turn the heat off. Add the lemon juice and give everything a good toss about.

At this stage you can wilt a cup or so of baby spinach in the mix for a lovely bit of colour and nutrition. The residual heat is enough to cook baby spinach.

Serve up and allow everyone to add their own grated cheese ( we like Parmesan and crumbled feta) and freshly ground pepper.

A salad is the perfect accompaniment.