One of my favorite ways to de-stress is trying new dishes but sometimes when my schedule is ridiculous (or I’m just feeling lazy…) I just want to whip up something easy that’ll last a couple meals. My go-to meals for this are baked pasta with either chicken or shrimp or a ground chicken dish. I usually try to do at least a bit of cooking on Sunday nights to avoid the stress of it during the week but this weekend kind of slipped away somehow so I ended up cooking this simple baked pasta chicken pasta dish on Monday.

I really don’t like using recipes when I cook because it kind of takes all the fun out of it.  Most of the meals I make have onions, mushrooms and spinach as a base and then I just add some meat and seasoning. I was writing down what I used to send to my mom so I thought I’d post it here too.

Ingredients:

• 1 medium sized onion, diced
• 1 small tomato, diced
• 1 package of mushrooms, diced
• 1/2 a bunch of spinach
• 1 lb of boneless leg/thigh pieces in 1 inch pieces
• 1 box of whole wheat pasta
• 1/2 lb block of pepperjack cheese, diced
• 1/2 lb of sharp cheddar, diced
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• lemon pepper, onion and herb seasoning, chipotle garlic seasoning, cajun seasoning – all to taste

1. First, I filled a large pot with water and a bit of salt and let it come to a boil. After it was boiling, I added the whole wheat pasta.
2. I set the oven to preheat at 350 while I was preparing everything else.
3. While the water came to boil, I sautéed the onions in the olive oil. After they yellowed a bit, I added the chopped mushrooms and tomatoes. I try to use the juices released from the vegetables to help with the meat so that I don’t have to use much oil.
4. I added the spices to the boneless chicken pieces for a couple minutes to allow to flavor to soak in and then added it to the vegetables to cook.
5. I added more spices according to how I wanted to flavor it and then added the chopped spinach once the chicken was cooked. Once everything was mixed and cooked, I just turned off the stove and waited for the pasta to be ready.
6. Once the pasta was boiled, I ran it under cold water and let the water pour out. I poured the pasta out evenly on the glass baking tray. Over that, I poured the vegetable and chicken mixture and mixed it in.
7. I chopped the pepper jack and sharp cheddar in thin slices and placed it evenly over the pasta and baked it for 15 minutes to allow the cheese to melt.
8. After the cheeses melted, I mixed the whole thing like that. I baked the pasta again for another 15 minutes to get that baked pasta texture. And that’s it! The photos are of the final product.