Chicken Thigh Fillet Pasta with Parmesan
Early in the morning before work, one familiar problem is making yourself a breakfast that will keep you full until lunch and be healthier than a cup of coffee and a cigarette. For a long time now, Italian pasta with sauce has been a good breakfast for us. Pasta with chicken, for example, meets every requirement of a good breakfast.
Pasta, even the very best, is just pieces of dried dough. Boiled dough tastes rather unpleasant. It’s the sauce, cooked separately, that gives pasta its flavor as a dish. The set of ingredients for the sauce, the spices, seasonings, and herbs, makes each sauce unique. The famous Bolognese sauce of veal and tomatoes with herbs and spices is the calling card of the culinary capital of Italy, the Emilia-Romagna region. Or spaghetti with a sauce of bacon and eggs: pasta carbonara.
You’ll hardly find a dish called simply “Pasta” on an Italian menu. The name of the pasta is always given with the name of the sauce, or, if the pasta is special and well known, with the established name of the whole dish.
The tasty Italian pasta I make for breakfast is pasta with chicken: fried pieces of chicken with basil and olive oil, sprinkled with Parmesan. It’s a hearty, very tasty dish that keeps you full until lunch. It’s simple to make and needs no special effort or exotic ingredients. Chicken thighs and fresh basil are easy to find.
Ingredients
2 servings
Step-by-step recipe
Pasta with chicken is tasty with any pasta, but short Italian shapes such as penne, fusilli, or farfalle are best. Their complex surface holds the sauce better. Also, the size of the pasta matches the size of the chicken pieces.
Remove the skin, membranes, and any leftover fat from the chicken thighs. Cut all the meat off the bone and slice it into strips.
Put the chicken in a bowl. Season with salt and pepper to taste and sprinkle with 1 tsp lemon juice. Let the meat stand for 10 mins.
Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a saucepan and fry a peeled garlic clove, flattened with the side of a knife blade. As soon as the garlic starts to change color, throw it away.
In the garlic-flavored olive oil, fry the chicken thigh pieces, separating them with a fork so they don’t stick together. Fry until the chicken is fully cooked, up to 10 mins.
You can stir the chicken pieces with a spatula, like fried potatoes. When the chicken is fully cooked, sprinkle it with a pinch of coarsely ground hot pepper, stir, and take it off the heat right away.
Pull the fresh basil leaves off the stems and chop them very finely with a knife. Put the basil in a small bowl, add salt, and once the salt has dissolved, add 2 tbsp natural olive oil. If you don’t have to go to work and make small talk after breakfast, you can add one peeled, very finely chopped garlic clove to the basil oil. That’s entirely optional. Mix the olive oil and basil sauce thoroughly.
Bring 2–3 l of water to a boil in a pot and salt it at 7 g of salt per liter of water. Cook the pasta until done. The cooking time is on the package and gives you al dente. This matters, because otherwise pasta with chicken sauce will turn out like a casserole. Drain the cooked pasta in a colander.
Combine the cooked pasta and the fried chicken, add the olive oil and basil sauce, and toss.
Put the pasta with chicken on plates and sprinkle with finely grated Parmesan. Garnish with a few basil leaves and, if you like, a few olives.
Pasta with chicken, basil, and Parmesan is served right away, without waiting for it to cool.
Calories and macros
850 kcal
Serving ≈ 340 g
- Protein37 g18% of kcal
- Fat43 g47% of kcal
- Carbs74 g36% of kcal
100 g254 kcalProtein 11 gFat 12.8 gCarbs 21.9 g
Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.
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