Recipe of the day*: Chicken Vegetable Pasta
Ingredients:
4 large bell peppers
4 medium sized red tomatoes
2 large onions
3 small zucchinis
10-12 chicken legs
Dried Oregano
Salt
Approx 10-13 ounces of dry pasta.
Approx 40-50 ounces of spaghetti sauce.
Instructions
Dice 2 of the bell peppers, four of the tomatoes, and one of the onions. Put into a large cooking pot with water and the chicken legs. Sprinkle an even/thin dusting of oregano and salt on the the vegetable as they float on the top. Boil until the chicken meat is soft and easy to pull from the bone.
Pull out the chicken legs with a pair of tongs. When they cool, pick all the meat off the bones and place in a large mixing bowl. Put the softened, boiled veggies in a strainer and drain thoroughly. Mash the strained vegetables with the back of a ladel or a potato masher or something until they're almost the consistency of sauce. Add the crushed strained vegetables to the chicken in the large mixing bowl. Keep the broth.
Boil the pasta in the leftover broth. Strain out what's left of the broth and add the pasta into the mixing bowl.
Chop the other onion in half. Then pull it apart and break it up, making broad, flat bite-sized "onion petals" from the layers of the onion.
Chop off the top and bottom of the remaining two bell peppers. push out the seeds from the middle and pull the bell peppers apart, also tearing them into broad, flat, bite sized pieces.
Fill a the bottom of a pan with a little water--- maybe a quarter inch. Put the onion petals in the water. Put the bell pepper pieces on top of the onion petals. Cover and heat on medium until the onions and peppers are still firm, but no longer raw/crunchy. (In other words steam/parboil them.)
Drain the steamed onions and peppers, but keep the onion/pepper flavored water from the bottom. Put the onion and pepper pieces in the mixing bowl.
Put the onion/pepper flavored water back into the steaming pan. Chop up the three zuchini into thin circles. Parboil them in the onion pepper water. Strain them and add them to the mixing bowl.
Add the sauce into the mix. the mushy boiled veggies add volime and flavor tot he sauce. The steamed veggies add texture, balance the meat taste, and are nutritious. You need to boil the zuccini separately because it cooks/softens more quickly.
Mix everything together. You have a whole bunch of really good pasta now! At least, mine turned out ok.
* Recipe of the day, because I came up with it earlier today.
