Chicken or Pasta? Why Compromise?

"Anything but seafood." That was Marina's response to my inquiry as to what she would like for dinner on her return from a week's trip to Mexico for work. This was not just because of the prevalence of fish in her Mexican dining options, but also the fact that people constructed a three-kilometer fish burrito outside of her hotel window. As you can imagine, this colored her perception of fish for the moment.

This left a choice of chicken or pasta. But I decided to be daring and combine the two, and not just in the frying chicken to be served over instant couscous paradigm. After some internal debate and exhaustive recipe research--I browsed through THREE magazines--I settled on this recipe for Chicken Puttanesca With Fettucine. I have no idea what Puttanesca means, but it sounds serious and sophisticated, doesn't it?

I also needed an appetizer appropriate to celebrating the Giants winning the World Series, but since I couldn't find any gigantic crackers, and any cheese colored orange and black would raise some questions, I settled on Drunken Goat, as I already knew it was delicious, and I'm sure there were many post-Series parties in which people acted like drunken goats.



Cooking the pasta and slicing the chicken into one inch pieces were simple tasks, as much as trimming fat from chicken and slicing it can be considered simple. Then came the question of gathering the ingredients. It asked for a quarter cup of pitted and coarsely chopped kalamata olives. Apparently you don't measure this before chopping the olives:



Which I guess makes sense, especially because it is hard to pour olives into a measuring cup without letting all the olive juice out of the jar too. Drain first, then chop, then measure, Marina taught me. How counter-intuitive. Also, apparently you can buy pre-pitted kalamata olives. This would have been useful, yes, but I'm not some kitchen lightweight who can't pit his own olives. I can't pit them tidily, true, but I pit them just the same.

As the chicken cooked, I added the sauce, the capers, the chopped olives, and the crushed red pepper. I was a bit worried that the capers would be overwhelming, as the lemony scent suffused everything for a bit. However, it seems like that scent simmered out by the time it was all done.

Visually, it didn't look much, until the garnish was added. What a difference a garnish of fresh basil made!



The only thing with this was that the noodles didn't separate quite as much as they should have, as the package said to cook for three minutes, and the recipe then had me set them aside while cooking the chicken and sauce mix. Otherwise, it was a sucess, a light but warm and tasty meal for a late Saturday night.

What sort of twists on the chicken/pasta combination do you like?