Dave's PYG Texas Tijuana Penne

Pasta Ya Gotcha (PYG) has a dish that is really great - Texas Tijuana Penne. It's a cream sauce with ground chicken over penne pasta and topped with cheddar cheese, and chopped tomato and green onion.

PYG came out with another dish called Holy Moly Chipotle Penne which is pretty good too, but my favorite is still the Texas Tijuana. Several years ago my PYG "chef" suggested I try the regular Texas Tijuana sauce with a dash of Chipotle in it, and it turned out to be, in the vernacular of the peasants, awesome! So here's my version of this custom concoction.

Ingredients

  • Dry penne pasta
  • Chicken sausage - I really like the one with basil and sun-dried tomato
  • 1 jar Alfredo sauce
  • 1 to 2 tablespoons dry taco seasoning (from CostCo)
  • 1 to 2 teaspoons Cholula chipotle hot sauce (in a bottle with a wooden cap)
  • Shredded cheddar (or Mexican blend) cheese
  • Diced fresh tomato
  • Sliced green onion
  • Tabasco sauce
Cholula Chipotle Hot Sauce

Preparation

  1. Start cooking the penne in a pot of boiling water. I like to put a teaspoon of salt in my pasta water to give the penne some flavor.
  2. In a small pot, brown the chicken sausage. You can either crumble the sausage or make small meatballs of it.
  3. Remove and drain the sausage.
  4. Wipe the pot clean and pour in the Alfredo sauce, mix in the taco seasoning, the chipotle sauce, and add the sausage.
  5. You don't need to cook the sauce, just warm it up.
  6. When the penne is done, put it in a pasta plate and pour some sauce over it. Add the cheese, tomatoes, and green onion over the top.
  7. To make it perfect, you should drizzle some Tabasco sauce over it and serve with a slice of a baggette roll.

What can I say? It's as close as you can get to the actual recipe, with my own personal chipotle enhancement.

The best part of this recipe is that you can make it the way they do at PYG by making the sauce ahead of time. In fact, you really don't need to cook the sauce in the first place, other than cooking the sausage. You can just cook the sausage, and then mix all of the ingredients together cold. However, I suspect that mixing them and warming everything together on the stove helps to blend the flavors.

When you're ready to make the dish later, you make it like they do:

  1. Get the pasta cooking.
  2. When the pasta's done, put a ladle's worth of sauce into a saucepan and warm it up.
  3. Dump the drained pasta into the saucepan and let the mixture meld.
  4. Serve with the usual toppings.
  5. This is the perfect quick and delicious pasta meal!

An Even Quicker Way

If you've got to have a PYG fix in a hurry, here's another way to whip up a quick substitute.

  1. Prepare a packge of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, aka "Kraft Dinner".
  2. Mix in 1-2 teaspoons Taco seasoning and some chipotle sauce
  3. If you want some meat, add one or two cooked sliced hot dogs, or some Spam.
  4. The usual toppings.

My mom actually used to make Kraft Dinner with hot dogs for me when I was a kid. Adding the taco and chipotle seasonings just makes this even more delicious!

Kraft Dinner

We always called it "Kraft Dinner", and I still do today. I found out when I went looking for images of this that in the US it's called "Kraft Macaroni & Cheese" now, but that it's still called "Kraft Dinner" in Canada. I never understood when I was a kid why it was called "Kraft Dinner", and now it's even more of a mystery.