Italian Chicken and Pasta

I love a good, quick, pasta recipe.  Even better...one that uses leftovers from the night before.

One of my go-to "I want to sit on the couch while dinner cooks" recipes is Italian chicken.  It's simple - marinate chicken breasts with Italian dressing in a plastic bag before you go to work in the morning.  When you come home, pour the chicken and dressing into a Pyrex dish and bake for 40-45 minutes at 350 degrees.

I usually baked 4-6 breasts so we'll have leftovers throughout the week.  One of my favorite things to do with this flavorful chicken is a quick pasta dish you're gonna love.

Ingredients

2 chicken breasts (with a little of the marinade)
3 small tomatoes
1/2 red onion
Olive oil
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese + more to top with
Garlic powder
Salt
1/2 box pasta (we went with thin spaghetti)

Directions

Prepare your ingredients!  Cut chicken into bite-size pieces, dice red onion, and cut tomatoes into chunks.  I like to remove the seeds from the tomato to keep them from watering down the sauce.

Saute red onion in 1 tablespoon olive oil and salt.

Once onions are translucent, add chicken and tomatoes.  Cook over medium heat until the tomatoes have broken down, stirring frequently (about 15 minutes).

Cook and drain pasta.  Add pasta, 1 tablespoon olive oil, 1/4 cup of Parmesan cheese, and a sprinkle of garlic powder to the pan and mix with sauce until combined.

Serve and top with a little more Parmesan cheese.  So quick and easy!  Nothing better than a delicious meal from leftovers!

Another thing I wanted to mention is a photography workshop I'm going to this weekend.  If you're in the (greater) Boston area, check out Camera Ready Boston.  It's a full day (10-5:30) of lots of information and fun with other novices and bloggers.  Here's what we're going to learn.

By the end of the day you'll be able to comfortably shoot in manual mode and know all about aperture, ISO and shutter speed. You'll understand how best to shoot in low light, bright sun, and how to maximize and use available light most effectively when shooting. You'll learn the basic rules of framing shots, how to shoot still objects, people, and how to tell a story and shoot a process. You'll also learn basic editing tricks in Lightroom to really make your images shine. You'll get hands on practice and learn best practices for using your images on the web, in a blog, for your small business, or for your family albums.

At the end of the day, the professionals are even going to take portraits of everyone who attends.  There are a few spots left, so act soon!