Chicken and Broccoli

20100808:
Today I made chicken with broccoli and fettuccine.

Gameplan:

01 Boil water.
02 Wash and dry broccoli.
03 Add broccoli to boiling water.
04 Remove after two minutes.
05 Add pasta.
06 Remove after seven minutes.
07 Cut garlic.
08 Cut chicken.
09 Add olive oil to pan.
10 Toss in garlic.
11 Toss in chicken.
12 Get chicken to 180 degrees F.
13 Turn chicken.
14 Wait one minute. Then cook the broccoli together with the chicken.
15 Can add soy sauce or some other seasonings.

Actual:

01 Boil water.
02 Wash and dry broccoli.
XX Cut the broccoli.
07 Cut garlic.
03 Add broccoli to boiling water.
08 Cut chicken.
09 Add olive oil to pan.
10 Toss in garlic.
11 Toss in chicken.
XX Used chopsticks to move the chicken around to prevent sticking.
04 Remove [broccoli] after two minutes.
XX Instead of removing the broccoli, I strained it, losing the broth to use for the pasta. Oops.
XX Boil water.
XX Add salt to boiling water.
05 Add pasta [fettuccine].
XX Not so much turning chicken as moving it about to make sure it cooks evening.
15 Add General Tsao Sauce.
14 Cook the broccoli together with the chicken.
15 Add more General Tsao Sauce.
06 Remove [pasta] after seven minutes.
XX Put pasta on plate.
XX Put broccoli on pasta.
XX Put chicken on broccoli and pasta.
XX Pour on excess sauce.

Comments:
1.) The chicken tasted good.
2.) The broccoli tasted good.
3.) Because of the sauce, perhaps I should have used a different pasta, or cooked it for an additional minute. The firmness of the pasta didn't quite match the dish. I suppose that's why many Asian dishes tend to use soft noodles. Or it could be this mindset that gave me this opinion. Alternatively, I could have considered cooking the pasta together with the sauce, and perhaps it would have soaked up more flavor than by just adding the sauce afterwards. Finally, perhaps there wasn't enough sauce to saturate the amount of pasta I made, because I felt there were bites of noodle that had an appropriate amount of flavor. One could also consider trying to take bites of noodle and either chicken or broccoli together. However, I was lazy and just eating with chopsticks; a satisfactory but not ideal tool for picking up fettuccine.
4.) Note: the broccoli seemed to soak up the sauce.
5.) Final note: Sometimes I'm curious if a sauce makes a dish taste good, then I guess the task should be in making the sauce from scratch and seeing if I can make a good sauce. For example, I can eat many things with barbecue* sauce and be like, this tastes good. But maybe its just the barbecue* sauce. I remember we were joking about how in The Princess and the Frog, the secret was just adding Tabasco sauce, but oddly, I guess that's not as ridiculous as it seems. ::shrug::

*I spelled it as barbeque, which is a variant, but the standard spelling is barbecue so I have changed it accordingly.

[20161015 Edit]