Sunday, August 5, 2012

Garlic Chicken Pasta

A few days ago I was wandering Ross with my girlfriend, Teri. While she was trying on some clothes I was in the kitchen aisle. Well, I found a mandolin and I've been wanting to get one for a while. This one also had a grating setting and my favorite of all, a julienne setting! All for under $10! I love Ross so hard. As soon as I saw it, I knew which recipe I was going to try next. I had seen this a few weeks ago but the thought of having to hand julienne veggies made me cringe.
Last night I was thinking of just serving leftovers but I wasn't in the mood for anything we had leftover and the more I thought about it, the hungrier I became. So, I pulled up my newest favorite website - paleOMG and got to cooking.
After dinner I promptly went to Juli's blog and asked her to marry me.
I was actually setting myself up for failure with this recipe. It contains 4 things that Gary really doesn't care for at all: zucchini, squash, tomato sauce and coconut milk. He LOVED IT! So here we go!

You're going to need:
2 lbs chicken, diced
2 zucchini, julienned
2 yellow squash, julienned
1 onion (small to medium), diced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1/4 cup tomato paste
1/2 cup coconut milk
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon hot sauce *
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1/4 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1 large can diced tomatoes
3 whole heads roasted garlic, cloves removed from peels
salt and pepper, to taste

I would highly suggest doing the first step a while before you're going to start cooking.
Start by heating your oven up to 400F (204C). You're going to roast garlic. Peel away the outer layers of the bulbs, just the outer layers. Cut off the top of the cloves so that you can see the individual cloves of garlic. Now, I use a muffin pan to set each bulb in to keep them from tipping over but you can use a regular pan. Drizzle about 2 teaspoons of olive oil over each head. Make sure that the garlic head is coated in oil. Cover them up with aluminum foil and bake for 30 to 35 minutes. The reason I suggest doing this before you're ready to use them is because they come out of the oven HOT obviously and you need to gently squeeze each head to get the cloves to pop out and when they're HOT it's kinda hard. Maybe I'm sensitive since the skin graft but anyway....

Julienne your zucchini and yellow squash.
Add olive oil to a large saucepan and saute the onion over medium-high heat until they're soft.
Then you're going to add in the tomato paste, diced tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, hot sauce, crushed red pepper, Italian seasonings, salt and pepper. Cook it for about a minute then add in the coconut milk. Don't worry, it doesn't make it very creamy at all, just enough to make it perfect.

Take your diced chicken and put it directly into the sauce. Turn the heat down to low and cook it for about 15 minutes. Stir it occasionally.

After 15 minutes, add the garlic cloves you've roasted and the julienned zucchini and squash and stir it up. You didn't miss a step, you're not mincing or dicing the roasted cloves up, just add them directly into the sauce. Cook for another 5 to 8 minutes to let the squash/zucchini soften up then SERVE!

You are not going to be disappointed. This dish is absolutely fantabulous!

* There are 100s of hot sauces out there. We used Texas Pete. It gave it some heat without changing the flavor.



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