Heart- Healthy Chicken With Whole Wheat Pasta

This is a great way to start your new year off right

Voila. All right, everybody. Happy New Year once again. We are, thank you very much

We're talking about New Year's resolutions and making some simple changes to your diet that may make you feel and look a little bit better

And today we're going to tackle spaghetti. I love spaghetti. It was a staple in my house growing up

My mom makes probably the best spaghetti sauce and lasagna and goulash

And these are all just really good things. But today we're going to do a little bit of a variation on the classic spaghetti

We're going to use chicken and we're going to use tomatoes and Kalamata olives. and we're gonna create a really beautiful and healthy dish

So let's start with the pasta. A simple change that you can make is to use a whole wheat pasta

and I'm gonna use about a box of it, into my water, and we'll move on to the chicken

I'm a big fan of Springer Mountain chicken. No antibiotics, they're fed a completely vegetarian diet

They're really good, clean, healthy birds. It's just my preference. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pound this chicken

into thin breasts And I gonna use a plastic bag that I cut the edges on to kinda contain it so I don contaminate everything else

on my counter. All right. That's pounded out pretty good. All right

This is the way that I really like to cook and eat at my house

And for me, the word resolution doesn't really ring real well with me

because I think it's about lifestyle changes. When I turned 30, I decided, because I just didn't feel good and I didn't look good

I decided that I wanted to make some changes. And I started with exercise, which is, I know, it ain't no fun, boo

But I started by embracing exercise. And I tell you what, when I began to work out, it really changed the way that I looked at food

It'll just kind of make you reassess, you know, what you're putting in your mouth

We'll start out with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. And I've got some beautiful little tomatoes and kalamata olives

I love olives of any kind. And olives are actually, they're good for you

They're kind of like avocados. That's the good fat. There's a lot of sodium in there, but very good fat for you

And I'm just going to cut them in half. If you wanted to rough chop them, you could do that

And you know what? Not only is this a very healthy, good-for-you recipe, this recipe is less than $10

So maybe your resolution includes saving some money too All right so my tomatoes and olives And in just a minute I add a clove of garlic And of course I going to reserve some pasta water for the sauce

Because the starch in there will help give it some body and some flavor

About a cup or a half cup of your pasta water. So if you're making a meat sauce, add that into your meat sauce

and it'll give it some nice flavor and thicken it up. So there's that

Take a look at our chicken. Ooh. That looks very nice. Garlic

Add some garlic. Maybe a little salt and pepper. That's going to be really nice

I'm going to add a little bit of my pasta water. Now, y'all, not only is this recipe less than $10

there's only 250 calories per serving and less than 9 grams of fat

So the pasta is done. Now, this dish is not only healthy and inexpensive

it's going to be really, really pretty. You know what I might do with this, too

Mmm. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm Mmm That won hurt Mmm Mmm chicken ready I just going to cut this into slices

Into strips, rather. All right. The sauce looks nice

So we're just going to put this together in one big dish. Look at those tomatoes and olives

Ooh, this is nice. Got that little pat of butter hidden in there

Little parsley right on top. Voila! I think I got enough for everybody

but I want to taste it myself before I serve it to my guests

Ooh, the chicken's good. Mm-hmm. Okay. Y'all can have some. Now, this is a very affordable, easy dish to make

This is a great way to start off your new year. And if you like this healthy recipe, you can get it and many more right here on the Paula Deen Network

Thank you. you