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Feb. 15th, 2006 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickDinner this evening was quite good.
See, actual recipes have measurements and instructions for how to do the non-obvious parts. This is not really a recipe because there aren't any non-obvious parts.
I had pasta with garlic, olive oil, butter, and parmesan on it. The pasta, whose name I do not know, is imported from Italy and comes in a gazillion colors. As I'm not a huge pasta fan, I'm going to describe this stuff as short twisty sticks, not as twisty as what you get in pasta salads. I realize that this is not an official pasta shape name and that to make it BE an official pasta shape name, it should probably end in -ini or possibly -oni... but that just didn't flow. It looks like it might be this stuff -- the shape and colors look about right from the crappy-ass small graphic they have on the page. It's along those lines, anyway. And it's colorful! It's got black and reddish and green and orange and yellow and so forth. There are a lot of colors in it. It's pretty. It's also pretty expensive (for pasta) and not available around here -- if I want any more, it's going to have to be ordered from afar. Anyway, it's good stuff, this twisty stick -ini pasta in colors and it'd be really great if someone (Mom?) could tell me the brand name so that I could go buy more when this runs out. I cooked about 3/4 of a cup of the pasta (I was hungry. Normally half a cup will do.) to al dente, which is not difficult to do with high-dollar pasta. It's more tolerant than the cheap stuff and, therefore, easier to do correctly.
The garlic was whatever was available fresh at the grocery. Fresh garlic is fairly cheap, freezes beautifully, and tastes a lot better than the stuff in the jar, so that's what I buy. It only takes a few seconds to peel and mash cloves of real garlic and I don't begrudge it the time. The olive oil was Bertolli's, I think. I don't have a gourmet selection at the grocery and tend to buy whatever comes in large bottles because I go through a lot of olive oil. Bertolli's isn't bad and it's got some nice floral notes if you heat it gently. The butter was just plain butter and I added it because many things in this world are better with butter. They just are. I don't care about authentic. I like butter. It adds salty flavors from the milk solids (the non-clear part of butter, when you melt it) and I like that. I possibly could have gotten the same result by salting either the pasta cooking water OR salting the olive oil but I didn't. I added butter. Look, if you don't like what I do, you can go do your own thing. There are no cooking police to show up and yell at you. Feel free to go off-road. At any rate, I combined equal amounts of butter and olive oil (about a tablespoon each) in a small pan, turned the heat to medium-low, and added about four cloves of garlic, pressed through my garlic press. I cooked that until the bulk of the garlic heat was gone but there was still a bit of bite to it. Probably this was about three minutes. Experiment and taste as you go. I poured this stuff over the cooked, drained pasta and then I got out the parmesan.
The parmesan was the fifteen-dollars-a-pound kind. While I personally do not buy parmesan at fifteen dollars a pound, people who love me DO buy me generous hunks of parmesan at fifteen dollars a pound. (Thanks, mom!) I grated it with my microplane grater. Damn, that thing is fun to use. Using my l33t microplane grater, I grated tiny curls of parmesan over the pasta until I started to feel guilty about the mounds of parmesan snow coating the pasta.
And then I ate it up. Yum! In a perfect world, there would have been some sort of salad, possibly one with ripe tomatoes, black olives, and feta cheese, before the pasta but it's February here and I refuse to eat cardboard tomatoes.
This totally made up for the lame-ass peanut butter and jelly sandwich I packed myself for lunch today.
See, actual recipes have measurements and instructions for how to do the non-obvious parts. This is not really a recipe because there aren't any non-obvious parts.
I had pasta with garlic, olive oil, butter, and parmesan on it. The pasta, whose name I do not know, is imported from Italy and comes in a gazillion colors. As I'm not a huge pasta fan, I'm going to describe this stuff as short twisty sticks, not as twisty as what you get in pasta salads. I realize that this is not an official pasta shape name and that to make it BE an official pasta shape name, it should probably end in -ini or possibly -oni... but that just didn't flow. It looks like it might be this stuff -- the shape and colors look about right from the crappy-ass small graphic they have on the page. It's along those lines, anyway. And it's colorful! It's got black and reddish and green and orange and yellow and so forth. There are a lot of colors in it. It's pretty. It's also pretty expensive (for pasta) and not available around here -- if I want any more, it's going to have to be ordered from afar. Anyway, it's good stuff, this twisty stick -ini pasta in colors and it'd be really great if someone (Mom?) could tell me the brand name so that I could go buy more when this runs out. I cooked about 3/4 of a cup of the pasta (I was hungry. Normally half a cup will do.) to al dente, which is not difficult to do with high-dollar pasta. It's more tolerant than the cheap stuff and, therefore, easier to do correctly.
The garlic was whatever was available fresh at the grocery. Fresh garlic is fairly cheap, freezes beautifully, and tastes a lot better than the stuff in the jar, so that's what I buy. It only takes a few seconds to peel and mash cloves of real garlic and I don't begrudge it the time. The olive oil was Bertolli's, I think. I don't have a gourmet selection at the grocery and tend to buy whatever comes in large bottles because I go through a lot of olive oil. Bertolli's isn't bad and it's got some nice floral notes if you heat it gently. The butter was just plain butter and I added it because many things in this world are better with butter. They just are. I don't care about authentic. I like butter. It adds salty flavors from the milk solids (the non-clear part of butter, when you melt it) and I like that. I possibly could have gotten the same result by salting either the pasta cooking water OR salting the olive oil but I didn't. I added butter. Look, if you don't like what I do, you can go do your own thing. There are no cooking police to show up and yell at you. Feel free to go off-road. At any rate, I combined equal amounts of butter and olive oil (about a tablespoon each) in a small pan, turned the heat to medium-low, and added about four cloves of garlic, pressed through my garlic press. I cooked that until the bulk of the garlic heat was gone but there was still a bit of bite to it. Probably this was about three minutes. Experiment and taste as you go. I poured this stuff over the cooked, drained pasta and then I got out the parmesan.
The parmesan was the fifteen-dollars-a-pound kind. While I personally do not buy parmesan at fifteen dollars a pound, people who love me DO buy me generous hunks of parmesan at fifteen dollars a pound. (Thanks, mom!) I grated it with my microplane grater. Damn, that thing is fun to use. Using my l33t microplane grater, I grated tiny curls of parmesan over the pasta until I started to feel guilty about the mounds of parmesan snow coating the pasta.
And then I ate it up. Yum! In a perfect world, there would have been some sort of salad, possibly one with ripe tomatoes, black olives, and feta cheese, before the pasta but it's February here and I refuse to eat cardboard tomatoes.
This totally made up for the lame-ass peanut butter and jelly sandwich I packed myself for lunch today.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 03:36 am (UTC)Garlic comes in jars??
Who would buy that?
Also, what does the end result of a clove of garlic and a garlic press look like? I always see instructions that say "pressed or minced" and I mince it. Allegedly I could press it with the flat of a knife blade, but that hardly seems like it would achieve the same end as mincing. So I wonder what I'm missing out on, not having a garlic press.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 11:14 am (UTC)The end result of a garlic press is a nice paste-like mash of garlic. It's finer-textured than a mince and doesn't have any hard little lumps. The big advantage of a garlic press is that it's way fast and the tricksy little cloves don't slide out from under the blade of the knife. The major disadvantage of garlic presses is that they're usually somewhat fiddly to get clean after use. I have one that cleans up pretty well, which is why I use it.
In my heart of hearts, I'd like to be manly enough to mash garlic with the flat of a knife, like the people on cooking shows. That's some theatrically impressive cooking, there. Unfortunately, I keep my garlic in the freezer (lasts longer, tastes just as fresh, does not sprout) and that makes the cloves frozen solid and thus very difficult to mash on the counter with the flat of a knife. They still go through the press okay, though.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 07:17 pm (UTC)I call down the curse of Emeril upon you! BAM!
no subject
Date: 2006-02-16 10:54 pm (UTC)I have actually tried the knife thing. That's how I know about the skidding and the cat hair and all. The cooking shows never discuss the danger of skidding or the inherent cat hair hazards and I gotta say, it came as something of an unpleasant surprise to me.