Creamy Pesto Pasta with Grilled Chicken & Caramelized Onion: The Best Ever!

Creamy Pesto Pasta with Grilled Chicken & Caramelized Onion: The Best Ever!

today I’m making a recipe Recreation that’s where I go out to a restaurant to eat and I have something that is absolutely delicious and I want to bring it to you so that you guys can make it at home and I can make it at home as well so today what I’m doing is I’m making a creamy pesto pasta served with some spinach in there some sweet peas and some caramelized onions and over that is going to be some chicken breasts that we’re going to grill up on the stove and I’m telling you it’s out of this world I’m Rockin Robin and I’m going to show you how to make it right after my chef joke okay so here we go with our Chef joke why couldn’t the Italian pasta get into his house because he had gnocchi so I’m going to start off here by cooking my caramelized onions because they’re going to take about 45 minutes to cook and you could always cook these up a day ahead of time even two days ahead of time and that way they’re always ready for you when you need them and I like to make more of these than I think I need just because they’re so good on everything I mean you can put these in sandwiches and put them in your salad and I mean anything literally so just cut your onion in half and then go ahead and peel off the outer part and then we’re just going to slice these up on the relatively thinner side so I’ve got a large frying pan here I’m going to put some olive oil in here and we’ll just I’m just going to lay that right into a cold pan and we’re going to put this on the stove and cook this medium low for as long as we can to get these onions to caramelize and you want to stir the onions frequently so that they caramelize slowly and don’t burn and I’m going to add a little bit of salt to this while the onions are slowly cooking I’m going to place a pot of water on the stove and get it hot for my noodles now you want to add a pinch of salt to the water and then I’m going to place a lid on it and just keep this at a simmer so it’s ready to go so while our onions are cooking slowly we’re going to work on cutting up our chicken breast I have a pretty thick chicken breast here so what I want to do is butterfly it cut it in half horizontally so that it will cook up much quicker I have two nice pieces here and if need be we can always pound these thinner to make them more even but I’m just going to go with this we’ll season these up both sides with salt garlic powder and some poultry seasoning don’t forget to head on back over to those onions and give them a stir every once in a while now towards the end of cooking these onions I found that I need to turn the temperature down you don’t want them to burn now once they get this beautiful color you know they’re just about done and that took about 45 minutes now to these onions I’m adding some organic baby spinach I got mine from Trader Joe’s and I used about a bowl full here so you know use as much as you like so I’m going to add this to the onions and just let them Wilt a little bit so I’m going to toss them and let the olive oil get mixed into them and they will cook down quite a bit and once these have cooked down as you can see here how much they have cooked down I’m going to place them in a bowl and just let them stay warm here until we’re ready to serve them up I’m going to use the same pan that we use to cook the onions and the spinach and I’m going to add a little bit of olive oil to the pan and let it heat up and then we’ll lay our chicken breast right in the pan and don’t touch it now we’re going to cook these for about four or five minutes on the first side until you notice that the chicken is changing color going up halfway on the side of the breast okay I’m going to flip this one over check out that nice golden brown crust now this second piece is a little thicker so it’s going to take a little longer but I’m going to go ahead and flip it over you can see it looks beautiful and I’m even going to put a lid on this so that I can get it to cook a little faster on the inside after another four or five minutes we’ll take the lid off and check the internal temperature we’re looking for 165 degrees Fahrenheit the thinner piece is done so I’m going to pull that off and place it on a plate and cover it with a little foil to keep it warm that second piece needs another minute or two to cook and then we’ll place that in the plate to join the other one and we’ll keep that warm it is now that time to start cooking our pasta so I’m using gluten-free pasta here I’m using Buns of pasta here that is gluten-free made from chickpeas but you can use regular pasta or any other gluten-free pasta and I actually feel like a penne pasta would work better for this recipe but the spaghetti version is all I had at the time now it’s time to work on our creamy basil sauce this is the best part as far as I’m concerned so I went out to my garden and I cut off some fresh leaves and then picked the leaves from the stems so I had about two cups it’s kind of hard to tell how much is two cups really because you can pack it tightly or you can pack it lightly so I went ahead and filled up my two cup measuring cup here and then I decided to weigh it what I felt was the correct amount and I came out to 60 grams so if you want to measure it out you can if you want to get your hands on one of these folding scales I’ll leave a link in the description for you I really love how compact it is place your basil into a large bowl of cold water and give it a few swishes that way you can rinse out any bugs that might be in there drain the basil into a colander of some sort here I’m using my salad spinner colander and you really want to get this basil nice and dry because you don’t want to add water to your sauce and I have found that a salad spinner does a terrific job so give that a go I spend it about three different times and really got most all the water right out of it look at how nice and dry that is and that’s what you want so the first thing we’re going to do is add the basil leaves to our food processor next is some raw pine nuts you can toast them or not it really doesn’t matter too much raw garlic is next and you can use you know more than one clove I only used one clove here because it has a little bit of a bite to it so cut off the end and peel the garlic and then I like to chop it up a little bit just so I make sure that it is really small so there’s no big chunks so I’m going to blend this now just to give the garlic and the pine nuts a chance to really get broken down so here you can see that the pine nuts and the garlic are still a little bit large and that’s why we want to pre-mix it a little bit before we add the rest of the ingredients now next we got to add some cheese to our sauce now you can use fresh like I’m doing here or you can use the grated but I think the fresh is better and we’re going to use about a third of a cup packed of the parmesan cheese and you can get the written recipe below the video click down there where it says show more and there’s our Parmesan cheese so to keep our basil sauce from oxidizing and turning brown I’m going to add a little bit of lemon juice to this about a teaspoon maybe two teaspoons we’ll add a pinch of salt remember that cheese has salt in it and then we’ll blend away now the last thing we’re going to add is a drizzle of some extra virgin olive oil and we’re going to be adding at least a quarter of a cup just depending on how thick it gets and make sure to scrape down the sides of the food processor every once in a while just to make sure everything’s well mixed let’s take this over to the stove and place it in that frying pan and heat it up to make our pesto sauce nice and creamy I’m adding some organic heavy whipping cream to the sauce about a half a cup feel free to add more but remember you’re going to be diluting the basil sauce next goes in some sweet peas that are frozen and you just want to heat these up so they should heat up in just a few minutes once this sauce is hot we’re ready to Plate it up so just before we serve this up we’re going to slice our chicken nice and thin into bite-sized pieces [Music] so let’s serve up that creamy pesto pasta with the sweet peas in there first next comes those caramelized onions with the spinach and I’m telling you these really make the dish do not leave these out here comes that tender delicious chicken and I like to finish it off with some freshly grated Parmesan cheese okay here comes that taste test that I have been waiting for foreign this is so good and savory you are absolutely going to love it I beg you to try it the caramelized onions are where it’s at give it a go want a dessert to go along with our delicious pasta dish we’ll try my key lime pie it’s light Tangy and delicious click the link on the screen and it’ll take you right to the recipe and you can try it out all right I hope you enjoyed today’s video if you did you can show me by Smashing the like button and sharing the video with someone you think might enjoy it alright so we’ll see you back here next week for another Rockin recipe

This creamy pesto pasta with chicken will knock your socks off with so much flavor. It’s savory good and I believe the caramelized onion makes the dish. Please try it and leave me a comment. I’m betting you love it. I ate this dish at the restaurant at the Marriot Bonvoy in Vancouver BC. It was called the H Restaurant. It was so good I had to make it for you. They served it with scallops but I used chicken as scallops are so expensive right now.
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⏰ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:33 Chef Joke
01:18 Caramelizing the onion
02:05 Butterflying the chicken breast
03:26 Cooking the chicken breast
04:48 Making the homemade creamy basil sauce.
07:58 Heating pesto on stove
09:04 Plating up
09:30 Taste test

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Creamy Pesto Pasta With Chicken
Ingredients:
2 chicken breast, pasture raised if possible, pounded or butterflied to ½ inch thick
Garlic powder
Salt
Poultry seasoning
1 large yellow onion, cut in half and sliced
1 bunch of organic spinach leaves
Olive oil
8 oz. of pasta, can be gluten free, or regular, my favorite is gluten free penne pasta

Creamy Basil Sauce
2 cups or 60 g. Fresh basil leaves, rinsed and dried
⅓ cup raw pine nuts
2 tsp. Lemon juice
¾ cup frozen sweet peas
½ cup heavy whipping cream, organic
⅓ cup grated parmesan cheese, fresh preferred, can use pecorino romano
1- 2 large cloves garlic, chopped
¼ – ½ cup of extra virgin olive oil

Directions:
Start with cooking the onions as they take the longest. I suggest making them ahead of time. Place the sliced onions in a large frying pan with olive oil, say 1 Tbsp, over medium heat. As they start cooking you should stir them frequently and turn the heat to low. You will cook these low and slow stirring frequently for 45 minutes.

After 45 minutes, add the spinach and cook until the spinach wilts, about 3 to 4 minutes. Set aside and keep warm.

Season the butterflied chicken with salt, garlic powder and poultry seasoning on both sides.
In the same pan, add 1 tsp of olive oil over medium high heat and once the oil is hot, add the chicken. Cook for about 4 or 5 minutes per side or until the internal temperature reaches 160 – 165 degrees F. Place the chicken on a clean plate and keep warm.

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and add the pasta. Cook to package directions.

In the meantime, prepare the creamy basil sauce. Place the basil in a food processor and add the pine nuts and garlic. Pulse until broken down. Continue adding the cheese, lemon juice, salt and begin processing. Drizzle the olive oil while processing and stop when needed to scrape down the sides. Blend until smooth.

Place the pesto sauce into the frying pan over medium heat and stir in the heavy cream. Once hot, add the sweet peas and stir until hot.
Drain the pasta and reserve ½ cup of the water if using regular pasta. Place the pasta into the pan of basil sauce and toss. Add a little bit of the pasta water if you need to thin the sauce a little.

Slice the chicken breast into bite-size pieces and plate by placing the pasta first, then add some of the caramelized onion and then with the sliced chicken on top. Garnish with more fresh parmesan cheese. Enjoy!

Thanks for watching and sharing!
Rockin Robin
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