November 6, 2014 New Recipe Chicken and Asparagus in Pesto Cream Sauce over Spaghetti Squash

November 6, 2014 New Recipe  Chicken and Asparagus in Pesto Cream Sauce over Spaghetti Squash

I did not get to the store today because we went to Peggy’s estate sale and I worked until 6:00.

So when we began to cook at 6:15 we decided to create a meal out of PPI’s.  We had fresh asparagus, PPI roasted chicken from last night’s meal and some PPI spaghetti squash raised in our garden this year and roasted last week.

Suzette suggested that we make a creamed chicken dish and add some of the fresh pesto she made this year from basil in our garden and serve it over the spaghetti squash.

I loved the idea.

I peeled and diced ¾ of a medium onion and sliced four cloves of garlic from our garden into rounds.

Then I diced 1 lb. of chicken breast while Suzette de-stemmed and chopped up seven or eight stalks of asparagus.  Suzette sautéed the onion and asparagus in a skillet and I stripped the spaghetti squash out of its husks into a bowl with a fork.  Suzette then put the squash into a glass pyrex baking dish and heated it in the microwave until hot, while we made a cream (béchamel) sauce. 

Béchamel Sauce

2 Tbsp. butter

2 ½ Tbsp. flour

1/4 tsp. Herbs Provence  

Salt and pepper to taste

Melt the butter and then add the flour and cook for 3 minutes to cook the flour.

We then added about 1 cup of milk stirring quickly to loosen the flour into a creamy sauce, after another minute or two of cooking at medium heat the sauce thickened again and we added 2 Tbsp. of White Vermouth to thin the sauce again and then cooked the sauce for a few more minutes.  When it thickened again Suzette added some water to get it back to creamy.

We added about 2 Tbsp. of pesto to the cream sauce and stirred the sauce into the chicken and asparagus mixture.

I fetched a bottle of 2010 Lionello Marchesi Castello de Monastero Chianti Superiore from the basement.

Suzette plated the dish by laying a mound of hot spaghetti squash in a pasta bowl and then spooning the chicken and asparagus pesto sauce over the squash. She then garnished the dish with crumbled fresh feta cheese from Old Windmill Farms that we had bought at the Farmers’ Market last week. The creamy, slightly salty feta gave the dish another flavor dimension and added additional color and texture. 

We loved two things about this meal; first, that we used so many ingredients from our garden and, second, that we created a wonderful meal from PPI’s.

I was amazed how much different this dish tasted from a usual pasta dish.  The use of the spaghetti squash instead of semolina pasta spaghetti switched the entire taste perspective from being sauce oriented to being squash oriented.  I actually found myself being attracted to the flavor and texture of the spaghetti squash rather than to the texture and flavors of the sauce as in a normal pasta dish. 

Suzette’s choice of a light Italian red wine was lovely also, as the combination of the squash and pesto cream sauce had heft that stood up to a light red wine.  Suzette’s knowledge of wines and pairings with food is really impressive.

 After dinner I filled a small plate with two pieces of PPI Kahlua soaked tres leches cake and scoops of vanilla ice cream for dessert (Suzette had soaked the tres leches cake with Kahlua to preserve it a bit longer.).

Bon Appétit

.