Easy Chicken Bacon Pasta

This Chicken Bacon Pasta is so easy - and so delicious - you can pick up a couple ingredients on the way home from work and have it ready within a half hour! Or so, depends on your motivation level - ours took closer to an hour because we took our sweet time before enjoying this smokey, cheesy, yummy dinner. 

What makes this Chicken Bacon Pasta easy? Store-bought rotissery chicken! Most grocery stores have these easy-to-grab, cooked-and-warm chickens in little bags ready to go. I usually glance at thedate and time stamp on the label, this one I picked up from Whole Foods for $7.99 had just been put out less than an hour before. And they certainly have the rotissery process down pat, these things are so convenient when you don't have time to roast a chicken yourself.

 Along with a rotissery chicken, we picked up:

• 1 pack bacon
• 1 white onion
• Garlic
• Parmigiano Reggiano

Along with stuff we already had at home:

• half-n-half
• white wine (optional)
• salt, crushed red pepper
• thin spaghetti
• olive oil

Super easy, we quickly preheated a stainless steel sacier pan over medium heat and - using kitchen scissors - cut 7 pieces of bacon into the hot pan. As those cooked off (with a helper stirring occasionally) we prepped the other ingredients. We quartered and then diced the onion by whirring it in our little veggie chopper. 

Along with the onion we grated about 1 cup of the parmigian and squeezed 2 garlic cloves through the garlic press. We "shredded" half of the chicken which is really easy with a store bought rotissery chicken - you can really just pull it apart and then use a knife to cut it into bite-size pieces. We used one thigh/drum and half of the breast. The other half of the chicken will be chicken salad tomorrow! We also added a second pot half full of water to the stove and got that up to boiling temperate for the spaghetti.

When the bacon was done we removed it carefully from the grease to a paper towel-lined plate and used another paper towel and tongs to remove the grease from the page, leaving some bacon "residue" behind. Then, we added 1 tbsp of olive oil and started sauteeing the onions over the same medium heat. We added a pinch of salt and a few shakes of crushed red pepper.

After about 5 minutes, we started boiling the pasta (we used about a 1-inch handful) which will go for about 7 minutes, starting our final countdown. Another minute and the onions are soft and translucent so we added the crushed garlic and stirred that in for a minute. Then, we added 1/2 cup of white wine (optional see below) to the pan and turned the heat up to medium high and really scraped the bacon residue and onions and garlic into that deglazing liquid - for about 2 minutes. When that liquid nearly evaporated, we took a measuring cup and carefully took some of the pasta water and added that to the onion mixture to keep the moisture going. You don't have to use white wine, alternatively you can just use the pasta water for this whole process!

THEN! We added the chopped chicken and bacon and stirred that in and THEN we took some tongs and tranferred the pasta directly to the sauce, using the tongs to stir it all together. Finally, we added 1/2 of the cheese (1/2 cup) reserving the other 1/2 to put over the top. Final stir and you are done!

We added some cheese over that and we were done! Super yummy Chicken Bacon Pasta with some for leftovers - all that left to do are the dishes!

We'll take a moment here to say this is our first post in OVER 14 YEARS. We started this blog 20 YEARS AGO and our heyday was definitely 2006-2008 - before a set of twins showed up and threw our schedule all out of whack. Those twins are now 17 years old and going to be seniors in high school looking at college! Who knows, if they depart perhaps we'll have the time back that we had 20 years ago to start documenting our cooking again! Thanks for visiting.