Today I’m going to write about a simple chicken recipe that goes well with the white pasta we had the other day. Pesto chicken sounds fancy and hard to make, but our lazy man version, with fake “pesto” makes it much easier.

The main ingredients of a classic pesto are basil, garlic, olive oil and pine nuts. It was traditionally ground together into a paste using a mortar and pestle. That sounds like a lot of work. On tv, most chefs use a food processor. Since I don’t have a food processor, we’re going to cheat and use some dried pesto. While it doesn’t make a nice creamy pesto sauce that goes well on pasta, it works well for flavoring chicken.

Our secret ingredient today is freeze dried basil. I’ve found that dry basil also works, but freeze dried basil works a little better because it almost becomes like fresh pesto when the olive oil hits it.

The tools we need are:

• A bowl for mixing.
• A spoon.
• A frying pan.
• A cookie sheet or oven safe plate lined w/ foil (for easy cleanup).
• Clean hands.

The ingredients:

• Freeze dried basil.
• Minced garlic.
• Grated parmesan cheese.
• Olive oil.
• Salt and pepper.
• Chicken thighs with skin on.

The procedure:

First, add some freeze dried basil to the bowl, followed by the parmesan cheese and garlic. The ratio doesn’t matter that much, just whatever you feel will taste good. I usually add about a third or fourth as much garlic and cheese as I do basil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Then add just enough olive oil to hydrate the basil. Mix well. If it feels a little dry still, you can add a little more oil. But if you add too much oil, it gets a little too runny for this recipe.

Here comes the messy part. With our “pesto” finished, we need to stuff this good stuff into our chicken. Make a little pocket by peeling away some of the skin in the middle, then stuff a spoonful of our pesto in there. It looks something like this:

Then slather a bit of the sauce on the outside of the chicken. When we have all our chicken thighs ready, preheat the oven to about 350. Put a little olive oil into the frying pan, and heat it to high. Brown the outside of the chicken thighs and set them onto the cookie sheet or oven safe plate. By now it should smell incredible. Bake the chicken on high until it’s cooked through, by my count it’s about 35 minutes. In the end it should look something like this:

Enjoy!

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We’ll start the recipe section with one that got me through college. I used to eat this pretty often in college, because it’s easy to make and easy to clean up afterwards, but still somewhat healthy. The beauty of this recipe comes from the fact that the only things you need to clean up are the pot and the fork you use to cook and eat. Rachel Ray calls these recipes one pot wonders, but this one goes one step further because you don’t even have a cutting board or knife to clean up.

The tools you need:

• A pot
• A fork

The essential ingredients are:

• Your favorite pasta- I use rotini cause it tends to hold sauce better.
• Cream of ____ soup. Your favorite cream soup, I usually use cream of mushroom because I like the flavor.
• Canned chicken breast.
• Your favorite frozen vegetable– In this case I used chopped broccoli. Chopped spinach or corn works well too.

Optional ingredients– If you have these on hand, it will make the sauce taste better.

• Minced or granulated garlic- I love garlic, I always have this on hand and always add it to everything.
• Your favorite herbs- I use italian seasoning.
• A bit of milk. If you like a thinner sauce, you can use milk or water to thin it a bit.
• A pat of butter– makes for a creamier tasting sauce.

The directions

First things first, you need to cook the pasta. Basically follow the directions on the box, except shorten the cook time by about a minute or minute and half– we want the pasta a little undercooked, because we will finish cooking it with the sauce.

Then we need to drain the pasta while keeping it in the pot. Using your fork to hold back the pasta, tip the pot to drain out the water. If you lose a few that’s cool, you can feed your garbage disposal.

Then, return the pot to the stove and toss in the rest of the ingredients. You’ll want to drain the chicken can before you add it, you can use the same method that we used to drain the pasta. Heat on low - medium, stirring every once in a while to prevent the pasta at the bottom from burning. Cook until your vegetables are cooked through. Voila! You’re done. That wasn’t too bad right? If you’re lazy like me, you’ll eat it right out of the pot.

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