Basil Alfredo Sauce with Chicken and Broccoli

Do you ever pull out a protein from your freezer in the morning and say something like 'I'll make dinner with this tonight' and then when it comes time for dinner you have no idea what to do with the protein now fully thawed in your fridge? That happens to me a lot... Like, maybe I should get better at meal planning, a lot. Yesterday morning I pulled two big chicken breasts out and said the same sort of thing as I always do, that I'd figure out what I'd do with them later. I had a general idea, I wanted to try making Chicken and Noodles---a dish my grandma made when I was younger, but when it came time to actually make dinner, I ran out of gumption. It happens a lot to me while pregnant I'm finding... I just don't have the energy for a lot of the things I like to do. In this case, it was making the homemade noodles, I just couldn't face standing up for that long.

SO. Now I had these two chicken breasts that I had no idea what to do with. I spent the next 30 minutes perusing through my many cookbooks and still not finding anything. I tossed around the idea of a stir fry, but decided against... I just couldn't find anything that really tickled my fancy. So I opened my fridge and decided to come up with something on my own.

It was delicious.

I had everything I needed for a cream sauce, the chicken, and some broccoli. So this is what I did:

First I started with the cream sauce (actually, first I got my pasta going, I hate forgetting to make the pasta until the last moment...use about the same amount of pasta as you have chicken). I make cream sauces by heart now, so I don't really use a recipe... This is an approximation of what I did:

1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup flour
1 1/2 cups milk
1 1/2 cups cream
some salt and pepper
a pinch each of garlic powder and onion powder
1/2 cup parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon fresh or frozen basil

Once that was all thick and delicious, I chopped up the two chicken breasts into bite-sized pieces and got them frying in some butter with a little bit of garlic powder sprinkled on as well. As that was frying I chopped up two heads of broccoli and once the chicken was still just barely pink, I tossed the broccoli in, put a lid on it and waited (stirring a few times) for the broccoli to get tender (but not mushy).

After the pasta was cooked and the broccoli-chicken mixture was done I tossed it all together with the cream sauce and we ate! It was fantastic if I do say so myself, and Aaron even liked the broccoli in it---which is saying something considering he doesn't really like broccoli.

Curious what the funny looking noodles are? Elk shaped pasta from IKEA. TOO FUNNY.