Fallen Souffle

One of our favorite restaurants is a little Italian restaurant about 2 minutes from our house called Lubrano’s. They have an extensive menu of including pizza, pasta, seafood and meat dishes and we go about every other month or so. As extensive as their menu is I am stuff on one dish…Penne with Vodka sauce or if I am looking for a slight change, Penne with Spinach Ravioli. YUM!

So Evan got me this fabulous new cookbook for Christmas, The Silver Spoon. It is kinda like the Italian Joy of Cooking or Good Housekeeping Cookbook. It has every Italian recipe you could ever dream of and at over 1200 pages it offers much inspiration for Italian food lovers. I haven’t even flipped through the entire book but I did find a recipe for my beloved Vodka sauce and to my surprise the ingredient list was simple and I conveniently had everything in my house!

The original recipe calls for chopped ham but I decided to brown up pieces of chicken breast instead. I also omitted the fresh parsley because I didn’t have any but the addition of some red pepper flakes brightened up the dish nicely. Evan commented that the sauce was surprisingly light this is because it only calls for tomato paste so we didn’t have to worry about chunky sauce. It also cooks up nicely in one pan for easy clean up.

You could get creative with this dish and add olives, capers or anchovies for more depth of flavor. This basic sauce makes a wonderful canvas to start from.

Penne with Chicken and Vodka Sauce
serves 2
derived from The Silver Spoon

2 boneless, skinless chicken breast cut into bite sized chunks
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 box of penne, cooked al dente
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 cloves minced garlic
red pepper flakes to taste
salt and pepper
1/4 cup vodka
5 tablespoons heavy cream

1. Melt butter in pan and brown chicken over medium heat. Add tomato paste, garlic, red pepper flakes and salt and pepper and cook for about 3 minutes. Add vodka and heavy cream and cook until you can no longer smell the vodka.

2. Taste to adjust seasoning. Add cooked pasta and allow the dish to heat through.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 8th, 2006 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Italian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.