Artichoke Pasta Recipe

This artichoke garlic pasta recipe is bright, tasty and satisfying without being heavy. It's packed with healthy ingredients and can easily be enjoyed by both meat eaters and vegetarians alike. Easy to prepare, it is also cheap but doesn't taste it!

My friend Molly is, despite her protests to the contrary, a bit of a borderline hoarder. She must have about 30 magazine subscriptions and they fill up a small apartment pretty quick! But her kind of hoarding also extends to food. her refrigerator and her pantry is absolutely jam-packed with random food items. Yet, despite the cupboards being full, she continues to buy food! She claims that she is NOT stocking up for when the zombie apocalypse occurs but what other explanation could there possibly be?

So this recipe came about because I said "Stop the madness! No more food buying until we have cooked our way through this mountain of food!" So I looked in the lower cabinet, a cabinet I was previously unaware of by the way, and saw these wonderful looking garlic egg noodles. This recipe would work just as well with your favorite pasta but, if you see these noodles at the grocery store, snatch them up because they are delicious.

If you want to add a little extra zing! to your sauce, try adding a little horseradish mustard. just a small amount, like about a quarter of a teaspoon. It adds another layer of flavor that is almost unidentifiable. It doesn't make the sauce have a mustard taste at all, it just accents the existing flavors.

Chicken, hands down, for me anyway, is best cooked over an open flame. No magical cooking secrets here other than Stop Touching It! (Molly, if you are reading this then you know that comment was aimed directly at you). Put it on the grill, let it cook until it lifts easily off the rack, turn it ninety degrees and let it cook until the color is right and it has those wonderfully beautiful crosshatch char marks. Then turn it over and repeat.

Now, if you are Molly and me and you are grilling chicken, I calmly wait for the chicken to cook but Molly prefers to keep lifting the hood and playing with the poor bird because she is impatient and has almost no self control.

I added chicken to this dish because we had it in the refrigerator and it needed to be used but, in all honesty, this recipe tastes great without it. Because it has mushrooms left in healthy sized chunks, it will easily satisfy any carnivores too.

These garlic egg noodles take the same amount of time that most other pastas take so in just ten quick minutes you will have delicious pasta ready to be smothered with this amazing sauce. Because they cook so fast, start them last. When you think the chicken is about five minutes away from being done, drop the pasta in a pot of boiling water. You want to let the chicken rest about five minutes after you take it off the grill and before you cut it, so that's why you drop the pasta at this time.

Tip: put a pot full of water on the stove and start boiling it BEFORE you start cooking the chicken. If it becomes a rolling boil before the chicken is ready, just turn the heat down to low and leave the lid on so that you can bring it back to a boil very quickly. You boil the water first because you don't want your chicken to be cooked and then sitting around going dry and losing it's taste while you are waiting for the water to come up to temperature.

When you drop the pasta you have ten minutes left to melt some butter in a saucepan and sauté the mushrooms and zucchini. I like to cut the zucchini in half, lengthwise down the middle and then slice it into half rounds.

For mushrooms in this dish, I prefer to have bite sized chunks instead of slices. Chunks of mushrooms tend to be a little 'meatier' and have an earthy flavor that I personally love in pasta dishes.

After you have sauteed the vegetables until they have a little caramelization on them i.e. a golden brown color, either pour them into the bowls or plates that you will be eating the pasta from or drain off the excess butter in a strainer. I like to leave the butter in because it tastes great.

Once the chicken is cooked and has rested for five minutes, cut it (or even tear it) into pieces and throw them into the drained pasta. Pour in the sauce and gently mix it all together. Put it on a plate and devour it.