Leftover Comfort Food: Baked Tomato Pasta w/ Chicken and Snap Peas

zesty — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:00:02 +0000

Good morning, good afternoon or good night! Hopefully you had a great father’s day weekend – I sure know I did. It all started with my first ever visit to a “Tweetup” at St. James Gate on Friday evening. There was a very good turn out and it turned out to be pretty interesting. The food was really good!

Saturday was all about the “watering”. Sprinklers and hoses were everywhere in attempt to water the lawn. It did not go as well as I envisioned but I spent about 3.5 hours moving everything around to get the yard wet. All in all it was not too bad since we had a lot of rain last night… so I may be off the watering hook for a couple of days.

Ever have a bunch of good food in the fridge some including leftovers and other just veggies that are on the brink of expiration? Of course you do – we all do. This is the battle I faced with the other day. I baked the Hoisin Chicken from last week, I had some fresh mushrooms, sugar snap peas and a little bit of cottage cheese just aching to be stir in somewhere. With those thoughts I prepare you …. Baked Tomato Pasta w/ Chicken and Snap Peas.

Ingredients

Cut up cooked Chicken
Handful or two of sugar snap peas
1 Tbsp. Olive oil
Sliced mushrooms
2 Cups pasta ( I chose Roitini since it was all I had )
1 Can 15 Oz. Tomatoes ( crushed )
2 Tbsp. Cheese
1/2 Tsp. Red pepper flakes
1/2 Tsp. Garlic Powder
Hint of cumin
Salt and pepper
3 slices of bread ( toasted and blended to crumbs )
1/2 Cup Parmesan cheese

Method

Preheat oven to 400 Degrees F
On the stove, warm a sauce pan over medium-high heat and start the olive oil and mushrooms. Cook for 2-3 minutes and then toss in the chicken.

While cooking the chicken, cook the pasta according to the directions.
Back to the chicken, stir in the peas, red pepper flakes, salt and pepper and let cook for about 3 minutes.

Drain pasta and add to the chicken, pea mixture. Add tomatoes garlic powder, cumin and stir together for 3 minutes. Stir in cottage cheese and move to a large casserole dish.

Top with Parmesan cheese, and bread crumbs and cook in the oven for 20 minutes until golden brown.

ENJOY!

Zesty Tip: Two tips for this one. Under cook the pasta slightly as it will continue to cook in the oven and be careful of the sauce. You want it to be wet enough prior to cooking. Add more tomatoes or a pre made sauce you have on hand.

Father’s day was wonderful! It started off with some homemade juice from my Juicer Recipes. I went with Apple Green Grape and it was fantastic! Sunday was very relaxing and the family time was great. I got a couple of pretty cute cards that really puts things in perspective. I hope you had a great father’s day. Now it is back to work but summer is coming!!

What is your favorite season of the year?

Take care

zesty

Guest Post: Hello from the Land of Dairy!

zesty — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:00:04 +0000

Hi everyone, Julie from Savvy Eats here! For those of you who are unfamiliar with my blog, I am a Food Science & Engineering student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in May. I’m an unusual engineering student in that I don’t want to do super-technical work when I graduate. What I really want to do is write about food. More specifically, I’d like to write about the science behind food. To that end, I am starting a new series this week on my blog answering all your food science questions!

For my guest post today, then, I thought I’d explain why yogurt is a good source of calcium, but cottage cheese is not. Hey, I live in Wisconsin, aka Dairyland, so it is entirely appropriate for my first post!

First of all, whole milk is essentially a bunch of fat molecules trapped in a water-based fluid. The only reason that the fat and water don’t separate is that the proteins in milk keep it from doing so.

There are two types of proteins in milk. Most of the proteins are casein, which are not soluble in water, but about 20% are whey proteins, which can dissolve in water.

That is the important part to keep in mind.

Whey = Soluble in water. The green-ish liquid in the picture below, from food-info.net.

Casein = Not a fan of water. Not water-soluble and therefore steers clear of it as much as possible. Oh, and all the calcium is naturally found in the casein, not the whey!

Cottage Cheese

To make cottage cheese, the casein must be separated from the whey. When this happens, the calcium leeches out of the casein and into the whey proteins. Since all of the casein and only a little of the whey is curdled to make cottage cheese, then, there is very little calcium.

To summarize

Whey = Now has the calcium, and isn’t in cottage cheese.
Casein = Becomes cottage cheese, but has lost its calcium to whey.

Yogurt

To make yogurt, both the casein and whey proteins are curdled together, so none of the calcium leeches out. Yogurt, then, is a great calcium source!

Yogurt = Contains casein + whey, and therefore keeps the calcium!

I hope you have found this interesting and enjoyable. I’ll be posting soon on savvyeat.com about why you can use a flax/water mixture in the place of eggs when baking. I hope you’ll check it out!