Chicken & pasta with mango cream sauce

Ingredients

• 16 oz. pasta (rigatoni works well, but whatever)
• olive oil
• 2 skinless, boneless chicken thighs
• 1 onion, sliced and separated into rings
• 1 red bell pepper, julienned
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 tsp fresh ginger, minced
• 1 mango - peeled, seeded, and chopped
• 1 cup whole milk
• salt and pepper
• parmesan cheese, to top

Cook pasta until al dente. Set aside.
Cook chicken with olive oil in a pan over medium-high heat for 10 minutes, or until juices run clear. What the hell does this mean? Who knows?
Cook onion and pepper in olive oil until tender. Mix in garlic, ginger, and mango, and continue to cook for 5 minutes, or until mango is soft. Pour in milk and cook until thickened, about 5 minutes.
Add pasta and chicken, and cook everything for a little bit longer (2-4 minutes), until chicken is all the way done and pasta is not al dente anymore (unless you like that sort of thing).
Eat.

Thoughts: The taste on this dish was pretty fantastic, but we used WAY too much pasta in relation to everything else. I would halve the amount of pasta down to 8 oz next time. Also, it would have been much more awesome if we had blended the cooked onion, pepper, mango, garlic, ginger, and milk together to make a smooth cream sauce. This was just way too deconstructed and uneven, if you know what I mean. If it were a cohesive sauce, there would be some mango flavor on all the pasta. The way we did it, there were huge sections of plain white pasta and some clumps of vegetables and mango. Not great. Not great.

Disaster Index: 3/10. Taste was good, presentation = not so much.

Coconut Sticky Rice with Nectarine

Ingredients

• 1.5 cups sushi rice
• 1.3 cups coconut milk
• 1/3 cup sugar + 3 tbsp
  
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 large nectarine, chopped

Wash rice well until water runs clear. Soak rice in cold water for several hours (preferably overnight).
Put rice and milk and sugar and salt in a pot and cook until the rice is done. Add more milk if necessary.
Put chopped nectarines on top.

Thoughts: Christ. Everything that could have gone wrong in this recipe did. The original recipe tried to get us to cook the rice by suspending it in a sieve over a pot of boiling water and steaming it. But we tried this for like, 45 minutes and it wasn't cooking. So we were like "screw this" and just boiled it as indicated above.
The nectarines were also awful. The original recipe calls for mango, but the only mango we had left was rotten, so we had to throw it out. And we were like "what other fruit could we use?" And all we had was a nectarine. The nectarine was not ripe. It was crunchy and tasteless. So we tried to cook it in some water until it softened. This took forever. And when it was done, it tasted awful.

Disaster Index: 4/10: Dan says 3 and I say 5.