Quick Chicken Alfredo #Recipe by Maya Corrigan

I’m sharing a recipe I made at the last minute from what I had in the fridge and the pantry. It was inspired by a meal I’d eaten at the restaurant chain, North Italia: a pasta dish with chicken pieces, mushrooms, spinach, toasted pine nuts, and parmesan cream. 

I had the first four ingredients, including fresh spinach from our garden. Without any cream in the house, I couldn’t make parmesan cream. But there was a jar of Rao’s Roasted Garlic Alfredo sauce. I'd bought without knowing what I was going to do with it. I cooked everything on the stove in nonstick pans, which allowed me to use a minimum of oil. 

This recipe makes enough for two and is easily doubled.

 Ingredients

1-2 tablespoons olive oil if needed

1/2 pound chicken tenders

5-6 ounces raw cremini mushrooms

4 cups fresh spinach

3 tablespoons pine nuts
5-6 oz of Alfredo sauce
1/2 pound fettuccini
Grated Parmesan cheese (optional)

I left out the cheese in the ingredient image intentionally because it's optional. The pasta is missing because I forgot to include it. Any kind of pasta works with this recipe. I used

Cut the chicken into cubes and the mushrooms into quarters (or more pieces if they are large).

Toast the pine nuts at low or medium heat in a small nonstick skillet, stirring the pan or shaking the pan occasionally to brown them lightly. Then remove them from the pan and set them aside. 

Boil water and cook the pasta while you prepare the other ingredients.

Heat a medium-to-large skillet, lightly coated with olive oil. Sauté the spinach and then mushrooms, setting each aside after it has cooked.

Add another light coating of olive oil to the pan. Brown the chicken cubes. When they’re cooked, add the spinach and mushrooms to the pan and turn down the heat.

Add the cooked pasta and the Alfredo sauce to the pan with the other ingredients. Cook until the mixture is hot. Transfer to a serving bowl and sprinkle the pine nuts on top.

Serve the pasta and pass the Parmesan cheese.

The verdict on the recipe at our house: Excellent! The dish had less cream and less cheese than the restaurant’s version but still tasted great, without the extra calories and cholesterol.

Have you ever tried to make a dish at home that you’d enjoyed at a restaurant? 

 

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on Facebook.

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Praise for A Parfait Crime

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