Something meaty and hot on the spot!

Today, I needed to get something on the table quickly, one of our children had an orientation at 6:30pm and we are having a severe arctic freeze over night here, so something hot, spicy, meaty, quickly was in order.

Grabbed the bag of frozen chicken pieces, a container of my homemade spaghetti meat sauce, and some fettuccine pasta and started cooking!  First off, I put three pieces of chicken in a bowl of hot tap water for 15 minutes, meanwhile the container of sauce was put in a pot of water to start defrosting.  Fifteen minutes later the chicken was enough defrosted to cut up into 1" squares and put in a hot pan with cold olive oil to being cook.  I sprinkled a couple of pinches of kosher salt and about a half tsp or so of pepper and half tsp of garlic powder and let it cook.  Meanwhile, the sauce wasn't defrosting quickly enough, so I put it in the microwave for about 2 minutes and that did the trick.  I poured the sauce in a pot and finished heating it up while the chicken began to brown since the liquid from the defrosted chicken cooked out and the meat now had a chance to caramelize for a nice rich flavor.  After the sauce was thoroughly heated I poured it over the chicken and combined it and turned the burner now on simmer.

The fettuccine went into heavily salted water and boiled for 11 minutes and voila!  Dinner was served on a platter with the meat sauce poured over the pasta.  I realized I didn't have anything green (my husband prefers to have a green vegetable with each dinner) so with a bag of fresh baby spinach in the fridge, I took the meat sauce
pan and heated it, poured cold olive oil (1.5 TBsp) in the pan, let it heat up a bit and grabbed 2 handfuls of the leafy green beauties and tossed them in the pan.  Within 2 minutes the spinach was cooked and everything was on the table and the family was eating happily.