Spicy Chicken Rigatoni and Oven Roasted Garlic Brussel Sprouts

Tonight, I was under a big time crunch. I ran out of lab early to come back and cook an ambitious dinner - spicy chicken rigatoni and oven roasted garlic brussel sprouts. Mostly because I already took the chicken out of the freezer to thaw in the morning, and I bought brussel sprouts last week and I really didn't want them to go bad. I usually deal with frozen vegetables, since they don't go bad on me as quickly and are relatively inexpensive.

Things went downhill from the start. To my surprise, we ran out of crushed red pepper flakes in my apartment, and so I tried to substitute with chili powder. While it does add a slight kick to the chicken, adding the chili powder to the hot oil with salt, pepper and garlic like it instructs to do so with the crushed red pepper flakes was a seriously poor idea. I don't quite know what happened, but it smelled pretty terrible, and at this point I honestly couldn't tell if it was from the chili powder in the skillet or the brussel sprouts roasting in the oven. But it smelled like melting plastic with a hint of spice. It was gross and gave me a headache. But I went on and cooked the chicken in the oil anyways since I was in a rush. Also bad idea. The chicken adopted the weird burnt chili powder taste and I had to add a lot of cheese to the sauce to balance out the flavors. Also, the alfredo sauce that I bought at the supermarket was COMPLETE GARBAGE. Gross. Do not buy the Ragu alfredo sauce, I guarantee you will immediately regret it. Not worth the maybe 75 cents I saved. Made my sauce taste very....off. A heavy dose of parmesan cheese helped thicken the sauce and mask the fake cheesy taste of the alfredo sauce. I substituted cut green beans for the peas that are called for in the actual recipe, since I personally think peas are disgusting. In the end, the sauce came together, and if you ignored the peculiarity of the chicken, the pasta wasn't half bad. I really like that it was rigatoni, the large tubes of pasta carried the sauce well.

I'll be honest. I have no experience with brussel sprouts. A friend made them for me once, and I discovered they weren't half as bad as their reputation. Soon after, I found a recipe and I decided what the hell, I need some more vegetables in my life. I halved the little ones, quartered the big ones and threw them into the biggest pan we owned (which sadly is a 9x9) with some olive oil, a LOT of garlic and some water, like the recipe instructs. Turns out, I added maybe just a little too much garlic, because at the end of the day, the brussel sprouts tasted like leafy, slightly bitter garlic things. I usually say, you can never have too much garlic, but believe me, it was too much. 5 cloves of garlic is just way too much, I'd suggest limiting it to 3. And I think I overcooked my brussel sprouts too because they were pretty soft and mushy, not the most pleasant texture, but some were crunchier than others.

All in all, I think I survived today. I didn't think I would have time to make dinner at all, and I managed to make both dishes, with prep time, in just under an hour. I would definitely like to try the spicy chicken rigatoni recipe again, this time with quality alfredo sauce and crushed red pepper flakes because I think it has the potential to be an awesome pasta dish. The brussel sprouts on the other hand, that I could maybe live without for now.