Creamy Chicken, Asparagus, & Orzo

Creamy Chicken, Asparagus, & Orzo is a delicious dinner with parmesan orzo is easy to make and delicious to eat. orzo. It is a one skillet meal that is easy to make and takes approximately 30 minutes to cook from start to finish. The creamy sauce is rich and tasty and is the perfect addition to chicken, asparagus, and orzo. This is a must try recipe for everyone!

What Is Orzo?

Orzo is a type of pasta that resembles the shape of a grain of rice. Albeit, bigger than a grain of rice! As a result, it has a somewhat chewy texture that grabs onto sauces and holds them better than longer pastas such as spaghetti. Ironically, though orzo is thought to be an Italian pasta, this pasta is better known in the US than it is in Italy!

There are many different ways to serve orzo. It can be served alone as a side dish for dinner or as it’s own meal. Orzo can be found in many soups that would do well with either rice or small pastas. Additionally, it can be incorporated into sauces that are served over meats and vegetables to make the dish a complete meal. As such, orzo is an excellent choice for the creamy chicken & asparagus dish!

Dinner Ingredients

Ingredient-wise, this recipe looks typical. Some key ingredients are chicken, asparagus, & orzo which makes sense since that’s basically the name of the recipe! Beyond that, you will also need cream and parmesan cheese along with some other recipe staples.

Here is the full list:

• 2 lbs Chicken boneless chicken breast
• 2 tbsp Paprika
• 3 tbsp Olive Oil
• 1 bundle Asparagus each stalk cut into 2-3 pieces
• 1 Onion chopped
• 2 tbsp Garlic minced
• 2 cups Orzo uncooked
• 3 cups Chicken Broth low sodium is fine
• 2 cups Half & Half
• 2 cups Parmesan Cheese grated
• Salt to taste
• Pepper to taste

Cooking This Dish

This creamy chicken, asparagus, & orzo dish doesn’t require a lot of prep work which is wonderful as far as I am concerned. The little prep work that you need to do can be done as the chicken is cooking. Therefore, the prep work isn’t in addition to the cooking time. Rather, it is during the cooking time! I love multi-tasking like that.

Follow these simple instructions and enjoy your amazing, creamy, 1 skillet dinner:

• Season chicken with salt, pepper, and paprika on both sides.
• In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium high heat.
• Sear chicken in skillet for approx 5 minutes per side until chicken is cooked through. (depending on the thickness of your chicken, you might need more or less cooking time). When done, transfer to plate and keep warm.
• In the same skillet, add the asparagus and saute for about 3 minutes. Let the asparagus soften a bit, but you want them to stay a little crispy so don’t over cook. Once done, transfer to a plate and keep warm.
• In the same skillet, add the onion and garlic and saute for about 3 minutes so that the onion is translucent and the garlic is fragrant.
• Add the orzo to the skillet and saute for 1 minute to get it a little toasty.
• Now, add half and half and chicken broth to skillet and stir.
• Bring to a boil, then turn down heat to medium low. Cover with lid and let it cook for 10 more minutes.
• Stir in parmesan cheese. Taste a little bit and season with additional salt and/or pepper, if needed.
• Add asparagus back and stir it into orzo mixture.
• Slice chicken into thin slices.
• Add chicken back into skillet and mix with sauce, orzo, and asparagus.
• Once mixed together, serve immediately.

Creamy Goodness

This creamy chicken, asparagus, and orzo dinner is delicious. I’m positive that it will become a family favorite. The downside of this recipe is that it is so good, there might not be leftovers. However, it’s easy enough to cook so making it another time shouldn’t be a problem.

If you are dying to try this recipe and don’t have chicken, you could still make this a variety of ways:

Substitute the chicken with pan seared steak. Creamy steak, asparagus, and orzo sounds like an enticing dinner.

Substitute the chicken with pork. Creamy pork, asparagus, and orzo has a appetizing ring to it, if you ask me. You could use pork chops, boneless pork ribs, or pork loin sliced into smaller slices. Just make sure to adjust cooking time accordingly.

If you aren’t gung-ho on meat, in general, you could make this creamy orzo with just asparagus and keep it as a vegetarian dinner. It’s filling enough to skip the meat and has plenty of protein from the dairy (parmesan cheese and half and half).

However, if you want to keep the chicken in the dish, but don’t have orzo, you can still make this dish! You could make it with rice; either white or brown rice would do fine. Or, perhaps, you want to keep with the pasta-ish starch, you could cook this creamy chicken dish with bow ties, tortellini, etc. Whatever you want to switch things up with will be delicious, I’m sure!

More Creamy Dinners To Try

Marsala Pork Chops

Crock Pot Beef Stroganoff

Chicken And Dumplings

Crock Pot Chicken with Peas

Creamy Martinis – You MUST Try!

Pistachio Martini

Chocolate Amaretto Martini

Tiramisu Martini

Snicker Licker Martini