FCG: Scampi and Lemon Parmesan Pasta 04/23/05

Greetings to you gangsters! Been a while since I've written to you all, so let me get caught up. First off, congratulations to Gina of our gang on the birth of her son! Congratulations to Kelly of our gang on the birth of their son! Congratulations to Heather & Brad of our group on the purchase of their new home! Those are all the highlights I know of right now, but congratulations to anyone else on any other milestone! Today I think I'll give you two recipes for the price of one (and you all have to admit, all this junk I send you is worth the price of admission :) as it were). The first one is for a Chicken Scampi which I liked: nice and simple. The second is for Lemon Parmesan spaghetti which is good, but is not a good leftover food, so it doesn't get as much of a recommendation. As always, enjoy! - Devon

Chicken Scampi

In a pan with 1 TBSP Olive oil, sautee the following:
1 large sweet onion (red onions work well. Vidalias or Walla Walla sweets would be good too.)
2-4 TBSP minced garlicLet that go until the onion starts to get soft a bit
and then add a sliced green peppera sliced red pepperand cook until these are crisp/tender. Spoon them out of the pan.
Into the pan, put:
2 boneless/skinless chicken breasts cut up
Stir this to coat the chicken with oil. As the chicken cooks, add
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup butter (do not substitute says the recipe and I didn't so I don't know the consequences)1/4 cup lemon juice
cook until the chicken is done.
Spoon the vegetables back into the pot and stir until warm. Serve over cooked pasta of your choice and top with parmesan cheese. This warms up pretty well, but the peppers get soft (unless you cooked them soft in the first place). Still tastes good, though. The peppers were my own personal addition (because I like peppers), so you could leave those out, but it would be a less colorful dish. Also, you could easily substitute shrimp for the chicken in this if you were so inclined. Obviously it would diminish the cook time, but I don't think you'd have to change anything with the olive-oil butter sauce.

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Lemon Parmesan Pasta

Cook 8 oz spaghetti (al dente) and put it into a casserole. (Don't really put it in the casserole if you don't want to, though. More on that later.)

In a saucepan, melt1/3 cup butter (I used marg: maybe that was the problem)and I also threw a couple of TBSP garlic into that just because I like garlic (and we all know I'm not kissin' nobody! :) )

Once the butter is melted (and your garlic is to your liking), add
8 oz sour cream
1 tsp lemon zest (I just grated a whole lemon into it)
3 TBSP lemon juice (I used all the juice I could squeeze out of my grated lemon)
and mix this all up. Stir it over your noodles.

The recipe then says to bake your sauced up noodles for 15-20 minutes at 400 F. I don't think that's necessary: sour cream burns pretty quickly, and all you're really doing is heating the stuff through, so if you don't want to dirty another pan, just stir your pasta up with the sauce and set it on the stove for a minute or so until it's as warm as you want it.

I think this would be good served with some grilled chicken or something, but the leftovers (at least if you use marg) tend to have the sauce separate and curd up a bit. It's still tasty, but the marg is kind of "greezy and obvious" (to quote from the Sweet Potato Queen: although this particular recipe actually came from allrecipes.com), so if presentation is important to you, don't make enough of this for leftovers.