Petsitting & Chicken Spaghetti

I pet-sat two dogs - Cindy the papillion and Cyrus the bichon frise - for someone at work a few weekends ago.  I love animals and miss Toby so being able to spend sometime around other little dogs was great.  They were both very sweet and very well behaved.  Cindy reminded me a lot of Rachel's dog Pacey and Cyrus reminded me of my mom's dog Barkley (when he's being sweet).

                                     

 

Another plus to petsitting was being able to do a little bit of cooking in her kitchen, yay!  I miss cooking (and baking).  A lot.  Not having all my kitchen tools limited what I was able to cook so I decided on something that was easy, required few ingredients, and would reheat well.  Chicken spaghetti!  I love chicken spaghetti.  It's something that my mom made often growing up so it's really comfort food for me.  Most people aren't really sure what I'm talking about when I say chicken spaghetti but once I describe what is in it, it sounds more familiar.  It's noodles and chicken and cheese.  Who could not like that :)

 

Yes, that is a biscuit in the background.  A home made biscuit.  It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be with few tools and I promise to post the recipe later!

Chicken Spaghetti

Ingredients

1 cooked chicken, torn into very small pieces*
12 ounces spaghetti
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 can cream of celery soup
2 cups shredded cheddar cheese

salt and pepper

Directions

1.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2.  Cook spaghetti according to package directions. Add any drippings from the container the chicken was in to the spaghetti water if you use a rotisserie chicken.  If you boil your own, use the same water used to boil the chicken, just make sure to remove any vegetables if you used them and throw them away (you may have to add more water and that's okay).  Drain spaghetti reserving abput 2 cups of spaghetti broth. 

3.  Mix spaghetti noodles with cheese, soups, torn chicken, salt, and pepper in a large** bowl.  Add the left over broth a little at the time until you get a good consistency (you probably will not use the entire 2 cups).  I know 'good' is a subjective term but it should be easy to mix but not soupy.

4.  Bake in 9x13 casserole dish at 350 degrees for 20 to 30 minutes.

* You have two options here.  You can buy a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store if you're in a hurry or just don't want to do too much cooking.  OR you can buy a whole, uncooked chicken and boil it for 1 hour in a pot of water, flipping the bird halfway through.  Feel free to add whatever seasonings you like to the water.  I usually add seasoned salt (Laury's is the best), a bay leaf, and any vegetables I have laying around that are about to go bad (onion, carrots, peppers, garlic, and the like).

**  I'm serious about large.  Use the largest mixing bowl that you have!  I've ended up washing two bowls too many times when I tried to use a smaller one.