New Year New Food

With the start of the new year, I have been extremely busy.  I haven't been blogging about our food as much as I would have hoped. That's not to say Megan and I aren't eating well, because we certainly are! 

Megan has been a huge help lately. I have been working and staying in my office longer and not coming home until later in the night. This is mainly due to my dissertation that I am writing that is summing up my research over the past two years. I am on schedule, and just finished the first chapter of it, only 34 pages long! There's plenty of more writing to do (four chapters to be exact), but I am super grateful to have Megan's loving support. Not to mention she KILLED her HESI exam!!!

Here's a dinner we prepared together last week. Once again, it features my loving cast iron skillet. Megan started by preparing the vegetables. Some canned diced tomatoes, baby portabella mushrooms, onions and garlic. 

In the meantime, I seasoned some chicken breasts with salt, pepper, and Paul Prudhomme's Poultry Magic (amazing). I seared the breasts in a hot cast iron skillet to give them a nice crust.

As you can see I only seared the breasts, the center is still very rare. I removed the breasts from the skillet and seared the onions.

And then... red wine, of course. This is Three Wishes Cabernet Sauvignon.

After a generous amount of wine, I scrapped the bottom of the pan and let the wine cook a little bit.

Then I added the mushrooms and garlic.

Cooked those down a little bit..

Then added the canned tomatoes and some dried herbs: italian seasoning and extra oregano.

Put the breasts back in and covered them with the veggie mixture.

Popped it in the oven.

Twenty minutes later, the apartment smelled amazing as I took the skillet out of the oven.

While the chicken was baking, we cooked some corkscrew shaped pasta.

And served the chicken on top of the pasta.

The corkscrew shaped pasta was perfect for this meal, probably because of its large density of pasta per its small size. I don't think the meal would have been the same with a thinner pasta such as a spaghetti or linguine. So... have you taken my advice and bought a cast iron skillet yet? If not, it's seriously about time you do.