Pasta Primavera

Here's another easy and tasty recipe I made this week.

Ingredients:

A few cups of fresh veggies (I used fresh green beans and asparagus)
1/4 cup unsalted butter
1 cup half-and-half
1 Tbs flour
salt and pepper
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

12 oz pasta (I used mini bow-tie)
6-8 plum tomatoes, seeded and cut into pieces

• Cook the pasta, set aside.
• Saute the veggies in the melted butter over medium heat until tender.
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• Add half-and-half and flour, bring to a boil, stirring often.
• Let it boil for a couple of minutes, remove from heat
• Stir in Parmesan cheese
• Stir in pasta and tomatoes. Serve hot.

I had some chicken in the fridge I needed to use up - so I grilled that and added it as well. It would've been totally fine without the chicken though.

Greek Penne and Chicken

In an effort to find something different to make for dinner tonight I went to allrecipes.com and clicked on their "quick and easy" link and then took the first recipe from there. Greek Penne and Chicken. I modified it a bit for us - but it was quite yummy.

I did the recipe x4 (which means i had two huge pots of boiling pasta and two skillets with browning chicken all going at the same time - a bit crowded on the stove top - and one of the eyes doesn't heat as well as the others so I was switching the two chicken pans back and forth trying to get everything cooked. Fun times. Fun times. I would've stopped to take a picture of this except that I was busy shuffling pans)

I left out the artichoke hearts - simply because artichoke hearts look funny to me.

Instead of mixing the chicken and pasta together I kept it seperate and I also bought some pita bread so people could choose to have their chicken with pita or pasta.

I also kept a portion of the dish cheese-free for my lactose intolerant diners.

I thought it was good (I had it with pita). I didn't get rave reviews - but the plates were clean at the end of dinner and a number of them got seconds. Even the cheese-free portion went over well.

I think in a normal size family it would be a quick and easy dinner - - around here nothing is quick and easy cooking for 12 though so I can't really comment on that.