One Pot Pasta Learning Curve.

Recently, I came across some recipes for One Pot Pasta's. They look easy and fast, so I decided to vaguely follow one of them, adding a bit of my own touches. Here's what I came up with!

For my creation, I used basil, some cut up grape tomato’s (cherry or any other kind would work well too), some roughly chopped roasted red peppers from a jar, and 4 cloves of thinly sliced garlic.

Basically, you just throw all this stuff in a pot, and boil it with water and spices. I’ll admit to being a little confused about how these ingredients would behave being boiled, especially the basil and garlic. But I decided to just go with it and see what happened. Normally, this recipe calls for linguine. All I had was thin spaghetti, so I used that. 

After it’s all cut up, you just toss it into the pot with about 4 ½ cups of water (that is if you’re using 12 oz of linguine and not ½ a box of thin spaghetti like I did), salt, lots of black pepper and a good tsp. of crushed reds. And you let it boil at a rolling boil, turning the pasta 1-2 times, until the pasta is al dente (usually 9 minutes if you’re using linguine, less for my thin spaghetti), and most of the water has evaporated. Take it off the heat, let it cool and thicken a bit, and then you’re supposed to be able to just serve it up, with some parmesan cheese and torn basil pieces if you want. 

Though I like the concept of this, I made some mistakes and it really turned out just so-so as a result. Here are my gripes:

 

-The *sauce* was too watery

-It was kind of bland

-The pasta got lost

 

Here are the mistakes I made:

-I used too much water for my frail, half box of thin spaghetti. I should have used 2.5-3 cups instead of 4. Even though I poured a lot of the cooking water out when it was done, it was still more water than I needed.

-The pasta matters. A thicker pasta – even a regular spaghetti – would have been much better.

-It needed more flavor. This may be my own preference, since I like strong flavors. Seriously. Adding water to things skeeves me out, unless it's tea.Water just…waters things down. Anytime a recipe calls for water, I'll use a broth of some kind instead if I can. This wouldn’t apply here, but next time I will need to add some very concentrated flavors to the water to keep it from dampening the whole thing. (Amore pastes come to mind – or a nice strong pesto.) This especially applies because imparting distinct flavor into something within 10 minutes is tough.

-I only used 1/3 of the jar of roasted red peppers. I should have just used the whole thing.

 

Things I did right:

-Thinly slicing the garlic was better than mincing it. You could press it too.

-It was nice and peppery because I use lots of black pepper

-I added brie at the end while it cooled. It didn’t give the full effect I wished for, but it did help.

 

The cool thing about this method is that you could throw any number of things you want in there. You could use a tall pot, or a large skillet. Isn’t it considered some major foodie rule to cook/finish your pasta right in the sauce? This is pretty much that. I will have to experiment more to get the flavors down. I discovered that the things I used kind of disappear/wither down when boiled. So next time...more more more.

 

Have you ever tried any sort of one-pot cooking method?

Pasta with Sun Dried Tomato, Mushrooms, Spinach, and Goat Cheese

Keeping with the alarmingly irregular rate at which I post blogs, it's been 6 months since I posted anything! So I guess the moral of the story is that I will post things when it feels good, and most of those times are spontaneous and inspired by the simple recipes that yet require a good amount of cooking sensibility.

I'm at the comfortable point where I know what I like, and I know which of those things go well together. I cannot comfortably not cook for much more than a week, which is about the same amount of time I can swear off wine. Anyways - less words, more pictures.

It usually always starts with garlic, in my world. I'd have the balls to say garlic is my religion, but until I've mastered making this, I don't feel comfortable making such a statement. Ignore the hot sauce hiding back there, as I unfortunately could not justify using it in this recipe. :-(

Once upon a time, it was said that I couldn't...wouldn't...befriend mushrooms. I've done a lot of crazy shit in my life, yet this may be the only true regret I have.

You already spied these I'm sure. Congratulations, but here they are again anyways.

They always look like little soldiers to me, ready to go onward into some delicious battle.

What I did was take the oil from the sun dried tomato jar, mixed it with lemon olive oil, and used that for my oil. Seriously, nothing fancy here. I add that to a very warm skillet and let it percolate and whatever else it wants to do, so long as it doesn't burn the place down.

Garlic is the answer to most things. I want to mention that at this point I add salt, (a lot of) black pepper, and more lemon oil. The garlic just needs around 3 minutes to start getting golden over medium heat. I should also mention that I like to make sure that the base here is quite strong to the taste, because if you're going to eventually put this onto something else, you don't want to lose the flavors. Also because I like strong flavored non-kimchee things.

 Does this need an explanation? If so, I put sliced mushrooms and sun dried tomatoes in with the toasted garlic and now garlic infused oil. I add the crushed reds at this point also. The reason why I wait to add them is because spice builds as it heats. For a recipe this fast, you could add them at the beginning with no repercussions. For a longer cooking recipe, I wouldn't add any kind of peppers too soon.  Do it too soon though anyways, because learning from your own mistakes and not vicariously through others mistakes is honestly better. PS - I cook all this for 5-7 minutes so the mushroom can do what they do best, which is sop up a stupefying amount of fat and flavor.

See in my mind, this picture lacks spinach. I could have easily added a cup more, because spinach wilts like crazy under heat, and quickly. I only kept this amount on the heat for maybe 2 minutes tops, and got this:

It's a shame it doesn't last longer. Hallucinatory green is my favorite color.

Pasta doesn't grow on trees. In fact, I was actually cooking it the whole time (10 minutes) I was doing the other stuff I posted above. All you do is find a big bowl, put the pasta inside of it (multi-colored Penne by Barilla, because I had a coupon for it and I'm a cheap asshole), and put that impossibly delectable thing you just made into the skillet on top of that. I also crumbled goat cheese on top of it, because goat cheese is really fucking delicious. I never understood people who don't like goat cheese. "It's too tangy!" are words that I've heard. Vegans have a better excuse than that.

No..she...didnnnn't.

Yes, I did.