Quick and easy pasta snacks

This is for people who want quick and easy pasta but are sick of instant/microwave mac and cheese. It doesnt take that much more time but is much better tasting. I guess it should be pretty obvious, but for those who aren’t aware..

Ingredients:

-Pasta that cooks quickly. Suggestions: Egg vermicelli, egg fettucini or gnocchi. I like gnocchi as it cooks in no time (literally 5 mins or less).
-small amount of fetta cheese
-3 eggs
-olives
-smoked salmon
-olive oil

Method:

1. Boil the pasta. If the pasta comes in coils, you can separate them in half to make it cook faster.

2. While it is boiling, heat up a saucepan with a bit of cooking oil. Crack the eggs, put in saucepan, whisk for a bit until they start solidifying. (I like to do that instead of beating the eggs beforehand because I prefer a more imperfect mix of egg white and yolk. It looks more interesting too.) Don’t overcook them, they should be almost done when they stop looking runny.

3. When the pasta is done stir in a dash of olive oil, stir in a small amount of fetta cheese, then toss in the cooked eggs, and then add the smoked salmon. Sprinkle on some olives.

And there you go. You can do this for dinner too if you’re lazy. It’s a relatively healthy option.

Well, I sure messed THAT up

I was cooking for my mum along with about 8 of her friends. I made some pasta dish, can’t remember what, but I decided I was going to experiment with the cool new bottle of lime oil I had just purchased from the local too-cool-for-you hipster culinary boutique. I was, of course, unaware that one only needs to use about 10 micrograms of lime oil in order for it to be effective. I used a couple of good glugs, drizzling it on just before serving. 

As the bowl of pasta was making its way around the table, one of the guests commented “Yum, I smell zest.” Indeed it did smell very much like a lime. I thought this was a good sign. It was not. I tasted it and it tasted like…well…have you ever eaten a lime peel by itself? It tasted just like that. Pretty disgusting. 

After we all had taken a few bites, a strange silence sort of descended on the table. Nervous glances were exchanged. Everyone obviously was experiencing unpleasant sensations in their mouths, but they were still eating because they were all unfailingly polite people. 

I immediately fessed up and told everyone that it was OK, I knew it tasted awful and I would not be offended if no one ate it. Everyone was pretty relieved. We ordered some pizzas and had a good laugh, but I still felt like a giant buffoon.

Lessons learned: 1) Lime oil is insanely powerful stuff. 2) Don’t experiment with your fancy hipster ingredients if you don’t know you’re doing.

Food experiments gone right

Occasionally, you come up with something that would probably be better off not existing. Today was just such an event for me and my partner. That was the deep fried hot dog. Yes, I know, people have done this before; however, I’ve never seen the whole thing battered and fried, just the sausage itself. 

Crunchy, well held together. Condiments featured ketchup(yes, yes, I know, but it’s already an abomination so what does it matter), mustard, spicy mayo, relish, sauerkraut, and a pickle with the seeds and endocarp(?) scooped out to hold things down. The batter was a generic one, though I used sesame oil in lieu of ’salad oil’(not having any on hand, and not wanting to substitute more peanut oil in). We made two. They were both disturbingly tasty, though they cooked a whole lot faster than either of us was prepared for. Oil was too hot, I suppose.

Anyway, there was plenty of batter left so we used it to do onion rings, fried cheese, and later sweetened it to make a crude fried cake. I think I’m done with fried food for a while

Bread!

This is a relatively easy recipe for a loaf of excellent bread, made from scratch. Total work time is about half an hour, and any self-respecting Goon with a spoon should have the ingredients around. First the recipe, then some explanation of the parts I had no clue about the first time I made it. This makes a single, large loaf.

The whole trick to making bread is not killing the yeast. All you have to do to not kill the yeast is not expose it to any temperature higher degrees celcius. According to Peasant Revolt, you can go up 37C/86F safely without killing the yeast; also, refrigerator temperatures will slow rising a lot, but not stop it.

So make sure that everything that touches the yeast is at a comfortable to warm room temperature, and you’re golden.

Basic White Bread

1 tsp sugar
1/3 cup warm water
1 1/2 tsp active dry yeast [1]

Put the water in a large non-metallic bowl [2], add the sugar, and mix. Add the yeast, don’t mix it or stir it, and set aside for ten minutes, covered.

2/3 cup milk [3]
1 1/2 tbsp butter/margarine [4]
1 1/2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1/3 cup warm water

Mix the above together, and make sure that it’s at room temperature. Add it to the bowl with the yeast. 

At this point I always add something like rosemary, finely chopped, which takes the bread from good to awesome. Any herb will do–chives or dill give it a nice flavour–but rosemary is delicious and strong, while a lot of others like thyme don’t seem to add much. A half cup of finely minced rosemary is sufficient, but this is something you’ll have to adjust to taste.

Add a cup of flour and mix it with a whisk until smooth. Add another cup and mix it with a wooden spoon. Add the last 1 1/2 cups of flour and mix with your hands. I’ll discuss technique for this below. The dough is ready when it’s not sticky–which means that the dough still feels a bit tacky, but when you touch it, it doesn’t adhere to your hands. If it doesn’t feel tacky, you’ve put too much flour in–wet your hands and work it again to put some moisture back into it.

Knead the dough for at least ten minutes [5]. Put it in a lightly greased bowl. Let rise in a warm room temperature place until it’s doubled in volume–45 minutes for me, but you can let it go longer if it’s slow.

Take the dough out of the bowl and punch it down [6]. Shape it into something that will fit a loaf pan, and put it in a lightly greased loaf pan. Let it rise again until doubled in size, then bake at 400F on the lower oven rack for 25-30 minutes. Remove it from the pan immediately and let it cool on a wire rack [7].

If you want a soft crust, brush the top with melted butter; if you want a hard crust, spray it with water from a mister a couple times while it’s baking.