Macaroni May #4

This week I'm continuing on with the theme of very quick pasta based meals. Meals you can cook in less than 20 minutes that taste good, are balanced, and you can feel good about feeding your kids.

Chicken Alfredo and Green Beans

The key to this meal is to cut the chicken thin, and cook it hot. Start your pasta at the beginning because, as usual, it's what's holding up the show. Cut the chicken thin and cook it hot in a pan with a bit of olive oil and some garlic salt. You want it to be hot enough that the oil is not quite smoking. It only took me about 5 minutes to cook three sliced chicken breasts in a pan once it was hot. Nice, cooked through, and browned. Perfect. While that's cooking start a big pot of water to boiling to blanch the beans. Blanching is simply cooking them for just a short time in boiling water, and then cooling them with cold water. If you did it really properly you'd cool them all the way down to stop any cooking action and then heat them gently right before eating. Cooking them like this gives them great color and keeps them crisp, sort of half way between raw and cooked as far as texture goes. When doing very quick cooking like this, I boil them for 1-2 minutes and them cool them to just warm and serve, it's fast and is my kids favorite way to eat beans. Top with butter or Parmesan cheese and they're perfect. I always snip the ends off the beans, I'm not even sure why, but it's the way I've done it since I was a kid and I sometimes wonder if the beans will explode if I don't. I'm not willing to take that chance, so I snip, and that's the hardest work for this whole meal. The last thing to get ready is the alfredo sauce. As usual I use sauce mix from a packet and I add a dash of liquid smoke to it and one tsp of lemon juice per packet of sauce. It makes all the difference in the world. Two sauce packets work well for our family of 6. Finish up by adding the chicken to the sauce, drain the noodles, add them, and plate everything. It's a crazy few minutes in the kitchen, and a little slower than last week at 18:43, but still fast enough to get us all out the door for soccer. This is another meal that my kids eat fast, and that's always a plus.
We've got one more week in macaroni May, and I've got something completely different, and even faster, in mind.