I was feeling the need to put something else on my blog besides mobile-mini-restaurant-reviews. Having a smartphone is nifty and all, but it just seems so much more meaningful to update my blog the old-fashioned way -- with a computer that has a real keyboard and far more editing capabilities. Anyway, here's what I made for dinner tonight. Just a simple beef and pasta dish.
A while ago I started re-thinking pasta. It all began when I saw my step-mom throw a few hand-fulls of pasta into the saucy juices at the bottom of a pan of roast chicken.She let the pasta cook while the chicken finished cooking, and in the end she had pasta that was flavored with stock and roast-chicken-drippings, delicious! It had previously been pounded into my head that pasta should always be cooked in a humongous pot of boiling water -- I started to question this after watching my step-mom's method. I've since realized, it really doesn't matter how you cook pasta. As long as there's liquid and heat at some point, the pasta will get cooked. So whenever I make pasta now, I put the dry pasta in a dry pot and then fill it with water so there's about 1-2cm of water above the level of the pasta. This is usually just enough water to cook the pasta, with just enough left over to make a sauce. Waste not!
Always salt your pasta water liberally and stir often!
To make the sauce I started with half a stick of butter.
Then sauteed ground beef, onions and garlic until they were browned.
Meanwhile I strained the pasta by balancing a colander on top of a measuring cup in the kitchen sink. Check out that thick delicious pasta water!
I used some of the pasta water to de-glaze my sauce pan...
...and I added several ice-cubes of chicken demi-glace from the freezer...
...and some lemon zest to brighten the mood. Oh yeah, and more butter! Always more butter.
Once the sauce was thick, I stirred in the cooked pasta, topped it with cheese, and voila!
That looks wonderful and I imagine even Miya would eat it!
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