Cooking for Beginners: Chicken & Zucchini Pasta

Once again, I plan a recipe for Cooking for Beginners (CFB from now on) and it doesn't turn out perfectly, so I decided that it was meant to be that way. How often do you go to cook something and realize your missing an ingredient? (Please tell me I'm not alone!)

Then I realized, even beginner cooks should know what to do when you forget that key ingredient or want to change up a recipe a bit. Ready to get started?

Chicken & Zucchini Pasta
Servings: 4
Adapted from: www.allrecipes.com

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Ingredients:

1/2 package pasta (I used Penne)

4 slices of onion (it rolled out of the picture)

2 tsp. garlic

1 zucchini

1/2 tsp. oregano

1 cup mushrooms

1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes

1 1/2 cups chicken broth

3 chicken breasts (or tenders or precooked chicken)

2 tbs. cream cheese

parmesan cheese

basil

salt

pepper

olive oil

Directions:

1. Cut the chicken into strips and season with salt and pepper. If you are using precooked chicken then just skip this. 

2. If you forgot to buy chicken broth (which is really weird for me since its a staple in the pantry), you can use bouillon cubes. Add about 1 cup of water per bouillon cube in a small saucepan and heat over medium high heat until boiling and the cube has dissolved. However, if your like me and couldn't manage to find bouillon cubes in the grocery store and had to settle for the packets from the international aisle, then add one packet to 1 1/2 cups of water and heat as instructed above. The picture below would obviously be before it dissolved.

3. In a medium sized saucepan, add 3 cups of water and lightly season with salt. Put over medium high heat. (This is for the pasta.)
4. Cut the zucchini into thin slices, dice up the onion and cut the mushrooms into bite sized pieces.
5. In a large skillet, add a little bit of olive oil over medium heat. Add the chicken and cook for approximately 10 minutes, flipping over once, or until the chicken is cooked through and browned on all sides.

6. Transfer the chicken to a plate. (I always use paper plates for this, there is no point in dirtying up another dish)

7. Add a little bit more olive oil to the skillet. Turn down the heat to low because the pan should be pretty hot by now. Add the garlic and onion and cook for about a minute or until the the garlic is lightly browned and fragrant.

8. Add the mushrooms and zucchini. Season with salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and oregano. Cook for 8-10 minutes or until the zucchini is soft. By now the water should be boiling for the pasta. Add in 1/2 box to the salted water and stir to make sure the shells don't stick together. I usually spend the 10 minutes loading the dishwasher with everything that I've used, cleaning off the counters and putting away any ingredients that I'm done with.

9. Pour in the chicken stock and add the cream cheese. Stir until the cream cheese is combined.

10. Add the chicken to the skillet and cook for 5 minutes more until everything is heated through.

11. Drain the water from the pasta (the kind I used took 12 minutes). Spoon the pasta onto plates and add the chicken mixture. Season with basil and Parmesan cheese and serve. Enjoy!

Tom wasn't a big fan of this recipe, he thought that the sauce tasted funny. I thought it was pretty good and would definitely add it to my list of things to make again, but I don't think the zucchini did anything amazing for the recipe at all. It kind of just blended in. I wouldn't have had any problems omitting it entirely.

Shrimp Scampi

I'm not sure how I feel about the Print This Page button at the bottom of this post. When I tried it at work, it only printed half of the page. I'm not sure what purpose that serves. So I'm going to leave it on there for the time being, but I want to find one that works better. 


I said I would be back with recipes this week and here I am. A few weeks ago Tom told me that he and C were tired of pork chops. Of course this was after I just bought another family pack of them, but that's another story. He said that they'd much rather have a pork tenderloin or to have some type of fish or seafood. I have no problems with seafood, I just don't have very many recipes to cook it. 


I guess its a Maryland thing. We steam crabs and shrimp. That's pretty much it. I honestly can say that aside from raw or steamed, I don't think I've had seafood any other way. Well...that's not true, I've had baked and broiled fish, but not very often. 


I found this recipe on Annie's Eats and thought it was simple enough that I would probably like it. Actually, the directions were so easy to follow that Tom made everything while I stood there and supervised. If I would have thought about it, it would have been this week's Cooking for Beginners Recipe.


Shrimp Scampi
Servings: 4
Adapted from: Annie's Eats

Ingredients:
1 lb. shrimp, peeled and deveined
1/2 box fettuccine (or linguine)
4 tbs. butter
2 tbs. olive oil
3 tsp. minced garlic
3 tsp. parsley
1/4 tsp. lemon zest
1 tbs. lemon juice
salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper to taste

Directions:
1. Bring a medium to large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook according to the directions. (In our case it was 11-13 minutes)
2. Add butter and olive oil to a skillet and heat over medium-high heat.   
3. Add the garlic to the butter and olive oil and cook for about a minute. 
4. Put the shrimp in the skillet, in an even layer and season with salt, pepper and crushed red pepper flakes. Cook the shrimp until lightly pink on one side. 
5. Toss the shrimp to cook the other side. They will take about 2 minutes per side depending on how hot you have the heat. 
6. Remove the shrimp from the heat and add in the parsley, lemon juice and lemon zest. We added more salt, pepper and red pepper flakes at this point too.
7. When the pasta is done cooking, drain the water and add the noodles to the shrimp mixture. Toss/stir until well combined. 
8. Serve immediately and enjoy!


I ended up liking this more than I thought I would but next time I'm going to up the amount of lemon juice and red pepper flakes. I didn't taste very much seasoning or acidity and I think it would really make a difference in the dish. I tend to go light on anything that says lemon because I had a horrible Rachael Ray recipe experience where everything tasted like an lemon slice that sat in liquid too long. It was disgusting!! Next time I want to serve this with a green salad (that only I will eat) and some crusty bread broiled with a bit of olive oil and Italian seasonings.

Asian Noodles with Beef

I was reading something today and decided I want to make some changes to this blog. I feel like I'm already doing something decent by showing just how cheaply I can make meals and including pretty versatile recipes, but I realized I wasn't really doing much for that cook that is just learning. So I'm going to create a section for beginner cooks and try to make a recipe each week that gives better detailed instructions on how to cook the meal. Kind of like how the Pioneer Woman does it.

This would have been a good recipe for that, but I didn't think about it until I had already started chopping and figured if I'm going to do it, I might as well do it right. Ironically, this recipe turned out to be more appetizer sized than meal sized. I still can't figure out why.

Asian Noodles with Beef
Servings: 4
Adapted from: www.allrecipes.com

Ingredients:
1 package sliced shitake mushrooms
1 green pepper, cut into bite sized pieces
1 red pepper, cut into bite sized pieces
1-2 lb. flank steak, cut into strips (or stir fry meat)
1/2 onion, diced
1/4 cup rice vinegar
2 tbs. soy sauce
1/2 tsp. ginger
1 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. parsley
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1 big squirt (1 tsp. maybe) lime juice
1/4 box capellini pasta
oil

Directions:
1. Add the oil to a medium pan over medium heat. Add in the red pepper, green pepper and onions and cook for 3-5 minutes or until soft.
2. In a medium bowl mix together the rice vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, sugar, pepper and lime juice. Put the meat into the bowl and mix around to coat. (If you have some extra time you can let the meat marinade in this for up to 24 hours.)
3. In a medium saucepan, boil water, add some salt and add the pasta. Cook according to directions. (The brand I have only takes 3 minutes which is awesome!)
4. Add the meat and marinade to the vegetables and cook until meat is well done.
5. When the pasta is done, drain and add into the pan with the meat and vegetables. Mix well to incorporate everything.
6. Serve in bowls and sprinkle with parsley.

Maybe its just me, but usually when I go to buy a red pepper they are humongous! Usually twice the size of a green pepper which bugs me because I feel like if I want equal peppers than I need 1 1/2 green peppers to 1 red pepper. Today that was not the case. Tom picked out the peppers when we were at the store so I didn't notice the size until I started cooking.

See, this is the size that I expect a red pepper to be! Not overly gigantic and not too small. Maybe this combined with the fact that my mushrooms went bad somehow contributed to my typically dinner sized meal turning into an appetizer size. Hmmm...

Chili Peppered Steak

I was supposed to make this recipe last night, but the meat didn't dethaw in time, so we gave up and ate McDonald's. Yeah, healthy, I know. So, today started day 1 of eating healthy and Tom's family weight loss challenge. They are all weighing themselves in weekly and exercising for the next 10 weeks. Whoever loses the most amount of weight wins the money that they put in at the beginning of the challenge.

I didn't join the challenge mostly because of money reasons, but I figured I would just end up disappointed if I didn't win and that would un-motivate me to keep exercising.

So, onto the recipe.

Chili Peppered Steak
Source: Adapted from The Abs Diet book

Ingredients:
1 tbs. olive oil
2 carrots, sliced
1 cup chopped broccoli
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and diced
1 green chile pepper, seeded and diced (the real recipe calls for a cayenne pepper, but the grocery store only had jalapenos, habaneros and chiles.)
1 lb. flank steak, cut into strips (real recipe calls for sirloin)
1/3 cup schezuan stir fry sauce (Hunan works too)
1 bag boil-in-a-bag brown rice

Directions
1. Heat the oil in skillet over medium high heat. Add in broccoli and carrots and cook until tender, about 5-8 minutes. Prepare boil-in-a-bag rice according to directions. Add the peppers and steak to vegetables and then pour in schezuan sauce. Stir occasionally until meat is cooked through. Serve over rice.

This recipe tastes like Chinese food, but its way healthier because it doesn't include any MSG. Honestly, the recipe reminds me of Hunan or Schezuan beef. The original recipe calls for 2 jalapenos and two cayenne peppers, but I definitely don't recommend it unless you're really stuffy and have a tongue of steel. This was just spicy enough to have some kick to it but not be overpowering. So, simple, quick and healthy! Not bad at all!