Meal Plan for March 4-10, 2012 (Olive Oil Pasta Recipe)

• Sunday – We ordered pizza. Yummy, yummy. Love it when I don’t have to cook!
• Monday – Pot pie, my recipe
• Tuesday – Olive oil & pepper spaghetti w/steamed broccoli and “classic” bruschetta, “recipe” below
• Wednesday – Baked parmesan crusted chicken with steamed broccoli, recipe from Moms Who Think. Next time, I would double the recipe of the stuff to cover the chicken with.
• Thursday – Baked mac & cheese, recipe from Skinny Taste. I added chicken to it though. Highly recommended!
• Friday – Quesedillas. Just cheese and chicken between two tortillas, melt. We also had Spanish rice with these, now that I think about it.
• Saturday – Key West grilled chicken with rice, recipe from Grocery Budget 101. This was pretty good. I would let the chicken marinade over night instead of 30 minutes like the directions say. The rice was just one of those .99 cent “chicken flavored” bags of rice.

I had this pasta dish a couple times while we were in Rome, so I thought I would try and replicate it at home. It came out pretty great! Unfortunatly, I didn’t measure anything…I just added a little, tasted it, and continued once it was right. So, I’m not sure how helpful this “recipe” will be. Next time I make it, I’ll try to measure.

What you’ll need: Olive oil, pepper, spaghetti, grated parmesan cheese.

1. Cook the spaghetti. Once its cooked, drain it, then put it back into the pot.
2. Pour in some little olive oil. Basically, you want an accent of olive oil. You don’t want it to pool at the bottom.
3. Sprinkle in some pepper. The right amount will look like the picture once you’ve stirred everything up.
4. Add some cheese. I don’t think you can have too much cheese, but that might be me. I even added more cheese when I served it too.
5. Stir everything until the cheese melts. Serve immediately.

To make the “classic” brushetta (Again, called that because that’s how we saw it named in Rome.) I mixed olive oil, pepper and garlic salt. I brushed the bread with a food brush, then popped it in the toaster. Once it was toasted again, I brushed another layer on because I thought it needed it. Taste yours though if after you toast it…maybe you’ll make your olive oil mixture stronger than I did.

I steamed the broccoli by adding a little water to a microwavable dish and putting the broccoli in it and microwaving it for five minutes.

If you try it, let me know! If you measure the ingredients, let me know; hahahaha.