Tuesday Dinners

Step by Step Directions

Boil a pot of salted water, add your pasta and cook until it’s cooked through. Before you dump out the pot save a cup of pasta water.

Going to type that again, save a cup of the pasta water. Do it now, while you’re thinking about it.

If you want you should be able to do this while the pasta is cooking, but if you’re a step by step kind of person you can wait.

Chop your garlic into small pieces. “Finely” is probably the adverb we want to use, but that would sound like we know what we’re doing.

Cut your chicken breast into bite sized pieces.

Zest a lemon. Other recipes may have exact measurements, but I started with a yellow lemon and when I was done it was white. Zest accordingly.

If you don’t have a “zesting” tool then you’re going to want to peel the outside of the lemon and then chop up the peel until it’s in a bunch of little pieces.

Cover the bottom of the pan in olive oil, turn the heat to medium, add your spices to the oil and stir until you can smell them and then add your chicken.

Once the chicken is cooked (I know what you’re going to say – I was hungry so I started this step early) add in your garlic and lemon zest. Mix everything together until your kitchen starts to smell really fresh (and your chicken is completely cooked).

Turn the heat down on your oven. Add in your pasta water (you remembered, right?) and the juice from your lemon (tip: roll the lemon on the counter before piercing the skin). If you’re going to add butter or cream this would be the time.

Let the chicken simmer for a couple of minutes in your lemon broth. This should give you enough time to find and remove all the lemon seeds that may or may not have ended up in the pot.

Add your pasta back in and stir it all together. Ideally there’s enough liquid left for you to coat the pasta. A good test for this is to grab a noodle and see if it tastes like pasta or lemon. If it doesn’t taste like lemon (or as lemony as you’d like) see if you can squeeze any more juice out of your lemon.

Add in your spinach, it will look like a lot when it’s first added to the pot but it will cook down. Like to the point where you wonder why you paid so much for it in the first place.

Feel free to sprinkle some Parmesan on top either in the pot or on a plate, one will obviously look better than the other. I also prefer to add some more crushed red pepper, the color looks cool and it adds another little bit of kick that I can control (because not everyone likes the same amount of spice).

Enjoy.

Variations

• Vary the kind of pasta used, I used spaghetti because that’s what I had, but you can use whatever you want
• Add some cheese, I did a variation of this for a friend with some mozzarella and got rave reviews
• Try one of the optional ingredients, spice it up

Unsolicited Feedback

• FA: Why add the spinach? Are you trying to be healthy?
• AK: Why couldn’t we just have wings instead?
• CF: Could we use a lime if we don’t have a lemon?