Not Quite Just Pasta with Sauce

This recipe is one of the several that evolved from stir fry while I was in Poland last summer. It's pasta with sauce, but a little more exciting. Premade pasta sauce is a component of this recipe. However, I've made a habit of doing this with a particularly plain kind of sauce. Tomato with basil but none of that fancy cheese mushroom chunk vodka nonsense.

In fact it's possible to replace the premade sauce with sauce of your own creation without changing the recipe much. It involves quite a number of additional tomatoes and the time to cook them down. I haven't yet had a batch turn out braggably well, though, so I'll stick with this for now.

Ingredients:

1 lb	dry pasta (I prefer whole wheat fusilli)
1 jar	pasta sauce
1.5 small	onion, diced
2 cloves	garlic, minced
6	roma tomatoes (or another fleshy variety), chopped
	olive oil
	mozzarella cheese
	parmesan cheese
	lemon juice
	crushed red pepper
	basil

Procedure:
Prepare your noodles as recommended but don't quite cook them all the way. They'll get a little more time later to finish up. Shoot for double al dente and set them aside while you prepare the sauce.

Raw chicken spooks me out something terrible. I buy raw chicken frozen and throw it right into the pan with some olive oil. As it softens I cut it into chunks with my stirrer. If you were so inclined you could cut your chicken prior to starting it.



Now a short aside. I use a lot of onions in my cooking. To make matters worse, the little red ones I get seem to be particularly aggressive. I have a few tricks to keep my eyes from burning out of my skull while I cut them. It's first of all important to have a sharp knife. It helps to also get the knife wet. I've also had success with making as many cuts as possible without letting the onion splay out and expose the slices (see above image). Finally, if all else fails, press your tongue against the roof of your mouth and breathe through your mouth. This one, suggested by Aaron, sounds strange but works exceedingly well.

Now your chicken has been cooking for a bit. Throw in some basil, red pepper, and a few tablespoons of lemon juice. Let the chicken cook through, stirring occasionally. Once the chicken is cooked (if you're not sure, leave it a bit longer; don't mess around with undercooked chicken), add some mozarella and parmesan cheeses. Use enough that the cheeses briefly make your whole pan into a sticky mess but then brown on to the surfaces of your chicken.

Add onions and garlic. Cook them until the onions are soft. Add the jar of pasta sauce and mix everything together until it starts to bubble.

Add the tomatoes. Very soon afterwards stir in the pasta. Your goal is to keep chunks to the sauce. If you're not careful they'll melt right in as part of the sauce.



Now throw this into some tupperwares. Makes lunch for one for an entire week.