Weekend Plans Post: Making an Amazing Chicken Alfredo by Cheating
Costco has a pretty good Chicken Alfredo for sale in its deli section. It’s not *GREAT* but it’s pretty good and it’s (relatively) cheap and it’s pretty easy to heat up and put into containers for the week’s leftovers. But if you doctor it up?
It becomes something that you could serve to your friends for your night to impress everybody or serve for a dinner date when you’re relatively sure you won’t be making out afterwards (there’s a *LOT* of garlic).
That’s what you need. Your Costco Chicken Alfredo, your pepper grinder, your garlic, your capers, your bacon, and your finishing cheese.
First off, check the temp so you can start your oven pre-heating:
Okay. 400.
Now, the very *FIRST* thing you should do is get a cookie sheet and put a sheet of aluminum foil on it. Then put your Alfredo pan on the sheet. Remove the plastic cover and throw it away.
Then get your black pepper grinder and set it to the coarsest setting and give a good dusting of pepper on your Alfredo.
After that, apply garlic.
I find that a simple salad fork will pull out some of the minced morsels and allow you to drop them evenly over everything. I like having some every centimeter or so.
Next, put some capers on there. It’s easy to make jokes about how “you can’t put too much garlic on there!” but it’s different with capers. You can pretty easily put too many capers on. So apply with some restraint.
Next up, put a light layer of bacon on top.
Then put some of your finishing parmesan cheese all over everything.
And, at that point, I like to put one more light dusting of coarse pepper before I cover it with foil and put it into the oven.
Cover it with foil, have one last peek before you bake it:
Now the instructions say bake it for 50-60 minutes but we’ve added some more ingredients on top of everything and so I like to bake it for about 70 minutes to make sure that everything gets all saturated with everything:
The best part is that this makes a *TON* of food. If you’ve got sides, you can get 8-10 servings out of this. If you don’t have sides, you can get 6.
And I took that out of the oven a few minutes ago and so I’m going to eat it while I finish this post up and I will have leftovers for all weekend (and I won’t mind a single bite, not even the last one from the last container).
This weekend is going to be crazy with gaming night on Saturday and the Royal Rumble on Sunday night and prepping the house for Maribou’s triumphant return next week. Squeeze out the last little bit of batchin’ it while I can.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured image is tonight’s dinner, minus the kaiser roll.)
@jaybird Are you planning to watch Royal Rumble live? If so, it is Saturday night, not Sunday. If you are just going to watch it on-demand, it doesn’t matter obviously.
My wife has a haircut tomorrow. I usually go with her and wander around the nearby Barnes and Noble, then we go get lunch.
Watching Royal Rumble tomorrow night.
Nothing else scheduled, really. Maybe some solo board gaming, probably some video games. My ZZ Gundam Model has been waiting for decals for a few weeks now, but I might go ahead and display it so I can put together a different one and finish the decals later.Report
No, not live.
Personally, I think that moving PPVs from Sunday night to Saturday night was a mistake. But they’re still doing it and they have the numbers…
Anyway, I’m going to try my hardest to dodge spoilers and watch it on Sunday night as if it were live.Report
Don’t we already know who wins? My good friend Ralph always contended that pro wrestling is the most honest sport because it can’t be fixed.Report
Well, having seen it, I can say that yes: They telegraphed the ever-living heck out of the Men’s Royal Rumble. We all know that it was going to have been Cody and, sure enough, it was.
As for the Women’s Royal Rumble, the person that *I* picked lost it. I guess I can understand why they gave it to the person they gave it to, but I’d have rather seen a main with Asuka.
But both were strong Rumbles! Not the best I’ve seen but definitely in the top quartile. The men’s match lacked a good comedy segment but the nostalgia hit was sweet and the finish was strong. The women’s match really needed to do a cleanup section at some point but it meandered too much (but then it really picked up at the end).
Good stuff all around.
WHY IN THE HECK DID THE RUMBLE OPEN INSTEAD OF CLOSE THE PPV WHAT THE HECKReport
I don’t think you could follow the Sami Zayn moment with anything else.
I thought the Pitch Black match was going to be the worst part of the show. Then Hardy sang. I never had to mute a music performance before.Report
The Hardy thing was really bad. Anything involving Bray Wyatt is an instant turn the channel moment. Sami being the most over thing in years is just amazing but well done.Report
That was the longest sustained boo that I have heard in years.
(Roman, not Hardy.)
I will say that I was left saying “holy crap, I want to see what happens with the Bloodline now? And Jey is interesting? How in the heck did *JEY* get interesting?”
And Roman, who had been wandering somewhere between “heel” and “tweener”, did a frog splash right on the bullseye in heeltown and it’s good to have him there.Report
Rumble predictions?
I don’t think the Rock will show up. It would be hard enough to get him to do one PPV, and we all know they want him for WM.
I’m predicting Cody Rhodes wins the Rumble. I’m also predicting he does something epic. Maybe not go the distance from #1 epic, but close enough to that. Then he faces Roman at WM.
IF they can get Rock for WM, then I don’t think they need to do Roman v. Rock. Bring back Rock as a heel assisting Roman. Rock was always best as a heel anyway. And if Cody wins the RR, like I suspect, then you could have Roman beat him by cheating, then the Bloodline piling on afterward. Then the Rock’s music hits, you get the massive pop, and everyone expects him to help Cody. Then he pulls a Hogan at Bash at the Beach and drops the people’s elbow on Cody. Then you get to build up to a Cody v. Roman rematch over a period of months.
I wish I knew what the hell they were doing with Bray Wyatt. That whole thing has been too slow of a burn, and it’s annoying. I liked the Taker segment with him at Raw XXX, but every week I want to see something that actually moves that story and it never comes.
One more prediction: we’re finally going to see the Bloodline turn on Sami Zayn. Roman will do something underhanded against KO. Maybe beat him clean in a decent match, but then pile on afterward, try to hurt him. Then Sami is going to hesitate when handed a chair or something to that effect, and Roman or Solo is going to take him out immediately. Jey will be sullen and disappointed.Report
Oh, jeez. I hadn’t put much thought into it beyond “they’re going to have Cody win it”.
I don’t think that they’d have Rock show up to be a heel. Too many people will be tuning in just to see the Rock and him being a heel would confuse too many people (including the ones who purchased Black Adam tickets the day it came out). They’ll have him come out, sing his greatest hits, drop the elbow, and then bring him back next April.
Anything else is too confusing.Report
Run all your speculation through the filter that these days the Rock can tell Creative, “It doesn’t matter what you think!” What does Dwayne want out of a cameo?Report
He’s about 50 now… at this point in his career, I’m pretty sure that his asks are something like “I want 7 minutes on the mic, not 5” and “I’ll drop the elbow but not do the rock bottom. My knees, you know how it is.”Report
It’s not cheating to enhance the base product. We’re picking up the flag.
Now, calling that list of ingredients ‘Alfredo Sauce’? That’s cheating. Creamy cheesy chicken pasta = yum.
Nothing much going on here… got a big round bale of hay delivered for the sheep/goats… but that’s probably the level of excitement we’re rockin’ round here this weekend.Report
Action packed day tomorrow. Memorial service for one of my son’s classmate’s dad who went way too young. Then, dinner and a soul music show with my new lady friend in the evening.
Sunday, emulating Marchmaine. Also, watching football.Report
I gotta go in and prep systematic botany stuff, I’m only about 3 weeks ahead in there and that’s not enough for me to be comfortable. Also I should probably write the lab (at least the Magnoliaceae and Lauraceae, maybe a third family depending on specimen availability) and set out the stuff for Monday’s soils lab.
I’ve been doing PT – I had complained of “arthritis like” pains in my right hip, turns out it’s a combo platter of one of the “band” muscles being too tight, and hamstrings being too tight (and my core being too weak, but I knew that) so now I go to the local PT place a couple days a week and get told how to do stretches (that I will eventually do at home, though I don’t have some of the fancy equipment they do). This takes time during the week, so I need to get caught up on weekends, and it also takes money, so I have to do things like not tell myself “I’m bored, maybe I’ll drive down to the quilt shop in Denison and see what they have” for a while.Report