weekly cookbook project: chicken and pasta with a spicy peanut sauce

I posted recently that my goal this year is to cook at least one recipe per week from my collection of cookbooks.  I have 20 of them and pretty much never use them other than to look through them from time to time.

This week I made my first cookbook recipe for my New Year's weekly cookbook project:  chicken and pasta with a spicy peanut sauce.  It's from The Great Big Pressure Cooker Book. I really like this book.  It has a big variety of recipes; it gives notes with each recipe as to how to change things up, how to serve it, etc.; the introduction talks about what to do and not to do with a pressure cooker and why; and it's written with the Instant Pot/electric pressure cooker in mind.

I picked this recipe because I had all the ingredients. (Actually, I didn't have the whole wheat ziti or fresh ginger, but I had regular ziti and ground ginger; both of these worked just fine.) Also, I really wanted to use the pressure cooker function on my new Instant Pot.

Here are the ingredients for the recipe:

• ground allspice
• ground cayenne pepper
• chicken breasts
• ground cinnamon
• ginger
• peanut oil
• peanut butter
• chicken broth
• ground cloves
• yellow onions
• whole wheat ziti pasta
• canned diced tomatoes

I couldn't find the whole recipe on the internet and I didn't feel like typing it out, so I just included the ingredients. Basically, you sauté the onions, garlic and ginger in the oil and the add the other ingredients. The Instant Pot is set the pressure cook on high for 8 minutes and then you do the Quick Release to release the pressure. That's it.

We both liked this recipe. It had good peanut taste that wasn't overwhelming and, since I didn't use the full amount of cayenne pepper, it wasn't really spicy. Had I been cooking it for myself only, I would have used the full amount, but Bob doesn't like as much spice as I do. I think this would have been better over rice, though. Ziti in a Thai-inspired dish just seemed odd to me. My only complaint about this dish is how totally blah it looked. It was a big mass of brown. Even the ziti turned brown from the peanut butter.  Otherwise, I'd make this again.