Saturday, August 15, 2009

Pasta for a crowd


Back from Canada! During our layover at Miles' house in New Hampshire, there was a dinner party. And I ended up cooking! One of the guests had dropped the recipe off earlier in the day... I guess it's from the Presidio Grill in Tuscon. I thought it was pretty tasty. Especially if you have a hoard of bona-fide meat eaters showing up and you are like wahhhh, why did I throw a dinner party. Technically this serves 4 but we tripled the recipe for 13 people and only ate half. So. Yeah. Lots of food. Pretty tasty.

Pasta with Chicken, Basil & Peppers

1/4 cup olive oil
4 tbs (a few cloves) of garlic, minced
3/4 lb fettuccine
1 package of chicken breasts, cut into bite sized pieces
2 poblano peppers, seeded and julienned
3 tomatoes, seeded and diced
1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped
4 ounces of prosciutto, chopped
2 tbs butter
1/2 cup parmesan cheese + more

--Do all your chopping and dicing (times 3, can you imagine? it took hours). Pretend that you are an underpaid food stylist for the Food Network and grumble to yourself about how Emeril gets all the glory and you get all the burnt fingers from pepper oils.
--Heat up the oil; fry the garlic in the oil until everything starts to smell like garlic for days.
--Fish out the garlic so that it doesn't burn, keep the oil in the pan.
--Put on the water for the fettuccine. When it boils, start cooking the pasta.
--Fry up the chicken in the garlicky oil for about 5 minutes. YOu could throw on a little salt and pepper, but remember that there will be cheese + brined meats in the equation soon.
--Now fry up the peppers for about 3 minutes
--Now add the tomatoes. I like them cooked down, but you don't really need to cook them that long. Now basil! Now prosciutto! Now the garlic!
-- Check the pasta. Is it done? In either case turn off (or down) the heat on yer sauce and add the butter and the parmesan cheese. When the pasta is done, so are you! Serve it up to your posse and eat the leftovers all week.

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