Daily Archives: August 22, 2010

Tasty Chicken Pasta

What You Need:

2 Cups mulit-grain rotini pasta, uncooked
1 lb. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts cut into bite size pieces
1 & 1/4 cups tomatillo salsa
1 (10 oz.) frozen corn
1 Large Green Pepper, cut into strips, then cut in half
1 Cup KRAFT (guess where the recipe came from!) Mexican Style 2% Milk Four Cheese

Make it!

  • Cook Pasta as directed on Package
  • Meanwhile, heat large non-stick skillet sprayed with cooking spray on medium-high heat.
    Add chicken, cook & stir for 4 minutes. Stir in salsa, corn and green pepper, simmer on medium-low for 10 minutes or until chicken is done, stirring occassionally.
  • Drain Pasta. Add to chicken mixture, stir slightly. Top with cheese. Remove from heat, cover, and let rest for 1 minute or until cheese is melted.

Nutrition (Per Serving – 4 servings):

460 Calories
9g total fat
4g saturated fat
1020 mg sodium (!)
54g carbohydrates
42g protein

“Improvements”

Kristin and I simply used four chicken breasts, which I cut into chunks. We added about 10 mushrooms and used three ears of fresh corn that we cooked and then cut off – this resulted in a lot of corn in the mix. For “salsa” we substituted 1.5 cups of Chi-Chi’s medium salsa.  Next time, we’d like to make some fresh salsa to make this a completely “from scratch” type recipe and hopefully further reduce that horrendous sodium content.  We also substituted in a whole box of Penne Rigata because it is what we hand in the cupboard, pasta is pasta 🙂

Kraft claims this is four servings, but we are looking at more like 7 to 8.

Final Thoughts

It was pretty good. I would suggest adding in some pepper for flavor and not to be scared of using spicy salsa. The medium Chi-Chis is decently spicy but it was completely mild in this dish. The fresh and slightly crunchy corn was delicious.

You’ll want to use a *large* saucepan for this. Ours was overwhelmed before even adding the pasta, so we served it up Spaghetti style by putting the chicken sauce over the pasta right on the plate.

If you might be looking for a way to use some corn, green pepper and salsa this would be an excellent and potentially quite healthy experiment. We wouldn’t post it here if we weren’t planning on making it again!

–Nat