Chicken Spaghetti

A few days ago, I stumbled upon this great blog. It's called The Pioneer Woman. I was amazed! This woman is the wife of a rancher. She works on the farm, has four kids (whom she homeschools), makes these elaborate meals, does some photography, gardens, and has time to blog about it all. Talk about Super Woman! And she's a very good writer. She's funny and keeps the reader interested. I was absolutely enthralled.

Anyway, I found this recipe for Chicken Spaghetti and thought it looked really good! So I decided to make it for supper tonight. Well, I was going to make it last night, but my parents decided to come visit and brought Subway. Who am I to turn down a free meal that I don't have to cook? So we just pushed the chicken spaghetti back one night. This recipe would also be great for OAMC (once a month cooking, aka freezer cooking or make-ahead meals). I plan to do some freezer cooking one of these weekends, so I'll have to keep this one on the list.

Since I knew I was going to make it today, I cooked and shredded the chicken last night. Now, the Pioneer Woman (her name is Ree) cuts up a whole chicken, boils it, then uses the homemade broth. I, however, am not as Super Woman-ish (that's totally a word) as her, so I just fried up a few chicken breasts and then shredded them using an extremely high-tech device called... a fork. Then I put it in a Rubbermaid container and stored it in the fridge until I was ready for it.

I broke up the noodles like the recipe says, and ended up with a little over two cups.

I filled my pot up with water and added about a cup and a half of canned chicken broth in which to boil the noodles. Then I ignored the pot while I was slicing up the green pepper and onions, until it's hissing demanded my attention because it was rapidly boiling over. Oops.

I only used about half of the onion because we don't care for a really strong onion flavor here in the Richter household. Next time I'll only use half of the green pepper too.

Then I drained the noodles and dumped them into a mixing bowl.

And I added the chicken that I cooked last night.

Ree says that she sometimes likes to use cream of chicken and mushroom soup instead of regular old cream of mushroom. Well, I didn't have any of that. But I did have one can of cream of chicken and one can of cream of mushroom. So I improvised.

Then I added the diced green peppers, onions, and pimentos.

As I added the spices (Lawry's seasoning salt, black pepper, and red pepper) and cheese, I realized that I was going to have no room to stir it.

So I transferred it to a larger bowl. I'm very good at making lots of dirty dishes. Ask James.

I dumped it into a casserole dish (again, I should have used a bigger one, but oh well) and loaded the top with cheese. Mmmm.

I cooked it on 350 degrees for 45 minutes and here's the final product.

The cheese got a little crusty on top instead of melty. I don't really know why. It might have been the brand (Archer Farms - the Target brand). It wasn't too big of a deal though.

This dish was very tasty! James liked it too! I'll make it again, even though it's a little more labor intensive than the stuff I usually make (I'm an amature). I'll definitely be putting this on the OAMC list. Next time I'll cut down on the green pepper, use a little more onion, and I'll actually measure the spices (I think it may have been a little heavy on the red pepper). Also, I'll split it into two casseroles because it makes a lot. We'll have three days worth of meals from this.

All in all, it's a very good recipe! A+! I recommend you try it!
Bon appetit!