Keep the Pasta Coming

I've been all about the easy pasta dishes lately.

I follow Philadelphia Cream Cheese on Twitter (@lovemyphilly) because, well, cream cheese is awesome. They share a lot of recipe links mainly.

Anyway, they sent me a tweet, which led to an e-mail, which was an invitation to try a new recipe out in exchange for some coupons and a little recipe book. Who isn't up for free stuff, right?

The recipe is Creamy Tomato-Basil Pasta with Chicken. Since I'm too lazy to retype it all here for your reading convenience, I found it on Allrecipes.com here.

This for That
Now, I did make several changes to the recipe.

If you've used these back-of-the-can style recipes before then you know they usually call for cooking the chicken breasts whole. We don't. We always cut them into bite size pieces before cooking. I think this speeds up cooking a bit, but it's probably balanced by the extra prep time. The real advantage, in my mind, is the chicken is easier to mix in to whatever sauce is involved and the entire thing is easier to eat.

My next change, and this was a big one, was to drop the 1/4 cup of Kraft Sun-Dried tomato dressing. Instead I used just enough olive oil to cook the chicken. I'm sure this really changed the flavor of the dish, but I had valid reasons.

First, we don't use bottled salad dressing so anything leftover would have been wasted.
Second, Hubby doesn't like sun-dried tomatoes.
Third, I couldn't find it at the grocery store anyway.

My final change was to use dried basil instead of the fresh basil in the recipe. Again, I couldn't find it at my grocery store.

Easy and Yummy
The recipe did go together quickly and easily. I never know if they really do only take the 30 minutes they are supposed to.

I had debated slicing the grape tomatoes, but the recipe didn't say to, so I rolled with it. They are cooked long enough to soften up nicely.

I thought the end result was yummy and would make it again. Hubby said it was pretty good. He's not a big tomato fan like I am and admitted the grape tomatoes had him concerned, but he said it was acceptable. Although I did see him giving some of the bigger tomatoes to Baru as he was getting toward the end of the serving.

In the end, I will keep it on the list, but it won't be in heavy rotation because of Hubby's tomato aversion.

My picture at the top of the post is actually next day lunch from leftovers. I mixed in some frozen broccoli to get a green veggie.

Of course I've already used one coupon to make that yummy cream cheese chili dip you see at parties. Sooo yummy. Hmm, maybe I should use another to stock up on bagels and cream cheese.