If you are on a budget, or just looking for healthy ideas for meals to cook you and your family, it is good to have a standby food that you can rely on. This article is about the two most flexible, and delicious foods you can buy – in fact I would hazard a guess that you have the two already in your kitchen right now and these make a great combination in chicken pasta dishes!
Number one is pasta. It is easy to make a quick and nutritious meal with pasta. It is one of those foods that should be everyone’s cupboard, if only to be brought out in an emergency. Pasta only takes about 10 minutes to cook, and you can add different ingredients and sauces to really liven it up. All dried pasta should be cooked in a large saucepan, full of water where you have added a liberal amount of salt, the salt really brings out the flavor. One well known tip is to add olive oil to the water which stops the pasta from sticking together. This isn’t used by most pasta chefs because it also stops the sauces from sticking to the pasta, but you can also stop the pasta from sticking together by stirring the pan occasionally – a bit harder work but worth the effort. If you are posh, or just want to impress someone with your cooking, you might want to try fresh pasta – as it tastes more delicate and is noticeably lighter.
But whatever you choose, you can’t live on pasta alone…..
The number two food is chicken. What food is more ubiquitous than chicken? It is low in fat, high in protein, and absorbs any flavor. Everything tastes like chicken. You can fry it, boil it, bake it, and cook with anything, and it will still taste great.
So if I love chicken, and I love pasta, I thought I should throw them together to create…. chicken pasta dishes! Chicken and pasta alone is a bit plain, because they both have only a very fine flavor. But they absorb strong flavors very well, and you only need a little bit of strong flavor to make it really tasty. Below I show a few ways you can marry chicken and pasta together to make delicious healthy chicken pasta dishes.
Chicken and pesto sauce work together really well, and requires minimum preparation time – just the way I like it. You simply cook the chicken, and add the pesto sauce, along with any vegetables you need and it is all done. The pesto is very strong, and is nicely diluted by the chicken and pasta.
Chicken and bacon, go together like peas and carrots. The smokiness of bacon really work through the meat, and the flavor mixes in with the sauce. It is one of my favorite combinations.
Chicken and leek also works well, with the distinctive taste of the leeks. In fact there is very little you can add that does not go well with the two – if they taste good, then they will taste good in chicken pasta dishes.
