Penne Noodles and Creamy Carbonara with Shredded Chicken

I love pasta always have and always will. I am trying to make my favorites more healthy. I may not make my pasta noodles from scratch, but everything else I am trying to make from scratch so I can control my in take of fats, carbs & sugar etc. I love creamy carbonara's. It is very delicious and usually loaded with salt if you buy the pre-made sauce. I also like the versions out there with chicken mixed in as well. So what I did was made a simple white sauce most people call it bechamel. Bechamel's can be turned in alfredo sauces or the starting base for bisque's, chowder's and cream sauces to pour onto fish. It is endless for the ways your can prepare it. So I am going to stop babbling on and just go straight to ingredients.

Sauce:
2 TBSP Butter
1 TSP Salt
1 TSP Black Pepper
1 TSBP of Flour
2 Cups of Milk (I used partly skimmed, since I am watching my weight)
2 TBSP of Epicure's Bacon Salad Topper (I like the bacon flavor in carbonara's so felt this was great for this meal)
1 TBSP of Bacon Fat (Every time I cook bacon I pour the fat into a mason jar in my fridge)

Meat:
Two Pieces of Boneless Skinless chicken.

Noodles:
1 1/2 cup of Penne Noodles

Topping:
Chunks of bread (2 slices)
1/2 cup of mozzarella cheese (shredded)

Start by bringing to boil water in a pot then add your noodles. While your noodles are cooking I then heat my frying pan and melt the butter along with adding the salt and pepper to the mix then add the flour and stir then add bacon fat. Then add the milk in a little bit at a time. This helps the sauce from burning, because if you pour the whole 2 cups in at once it will burn and also get lumpy. For each time I would add more milk I would a sprinkle of the bacon salad topper from Epicure's spice. I always tasted as I went and sometimes would have to add just a pinch of salt. Once you have finished adding all the milk bit by bit and it has thickened. I turned off the stove, put it on the back burner with a lid on top.

During the time of making the carbonara sauce the penne noodles were already finished. So I drained them and put them aside in a bowl.  Then I cooked the two pieces of chicken up into shredded pieces. Then I put the noodles into the pan with the sauce and also added the chicken and gave it a good stir, then poured the whole batch into a baking dish. Then I topped it with the chunks of bread and shredded cheese. I put the dish in the oven for 15 minutes just to warm it up and allow the cheese to melt and the bread chunks to get crispy.

The whole family loved it! Jonathan never compliments my meals often and when he does, that means he is really impressed. He took his first bite and first thing that came out of his mouth was "Mmm this is delicious." and my little girl took a lick of the sauce off her spoon first and as soon as she realized how tasty it was she ate it all up and with each mouthful she would say out loud "Good num (yum)."

Sweetness!

At the grocery store tonight in No Frills, Jonathan noticed something different in the store that is not ever been seen in No Frills ever! From what I can remember anyways. So, we bought one to try it out. It is a cylinder long style like stick and has a hard rind on the outside and the consistency of pineapple on the inside and it is sweet.
Have you figured it out yet? What I am talking about? It not I will give you a hint.
There are a lot of companies these days that say they use it in its most purest form in a small tiny grain. But who really knows if they really do. Some people accuse thing sweet thing of making them gain weight. When in reality most people buy this product after it has most certainly been processed and packaged. I am sure that maybe in its purest form it is good for you and can be a very tasty treat.
Anyways I am done hinting around I am going to plain out tell you, since you might not know what it is, and if you have guessed it after the first mini-paragraph then good for you. So, this sweet treat that we bought is indeed a SUGAR CANE stick!
Pretty cool huh? I think so. I've heard of sugar cane sticks from the beginning of time, but never really encountered one. And the most funniest part of this whole thing is; Jonathan thought that it wasn't real, because he use to play farmville on facebooks Zynga games and you can grow crops and he grew some 'sugar cane,' in his crops. He thought it was something made up and never thought it was real so when I heard him say to me in the car after we bought it 'I thought no such thing existed and that farmville was making it up.'
Now that is just plain funny to me. I said to him 'Well, if you really paid any attention to the multiple times we went grocery shopping and bought a bag of sugar, almost all companies who make sugar always state somewhere on the bag 'made with real cane sugar'.
He really didn't even know! I know I am mean and shouldn't be making fun of my husband, but his simpleton moments make me laugh and I guess that is why I love him so much!