Breakfast Pasta

I'm back and caught up on other things. So I can share some more recipes. (I have a handful 'in stock' now, including some that friends have shared.)

And a super cute picture of my niece!

So Monday night, my brother crashed at my place and I wanted to make sure he had something to eat before I left for work on Tuesday, but I had no leftovers in the fridge or milk (for him to have cereal) since I had cleaned it pretty well last week.

What to make?

Luckily I had frozen half a can of diced tomatoes! (Never put an open can in the fridge or freezer. Always move it to an alternate container. Thank you Janki's mom for reminding all of us awhile ago!) And I still had those cool purple carrots. And some fresh basil from my little plant outside.

So I decided to make some pasta with a quick tomato sauce.

Quick Marinara sauce (some tips from Mario Batali, some cause I'm crazy?)

Ingredients

Shredded carrots (mine were shredded purple carrots - but yours can be normal)

roughly chopped reconstituted Dried Mushrooms (you don't have to put mushrooms, but if you have them why not?)

Can of diced tomatoes

dried oregano

olive oil

salt

honey

freshly ground pepper (I love my pepper mill, GET ONE if you don't have one!)

couple of leaves of fresh basil (only if you have it)

slivers of parmesan (use a vegetable peeler to get nice slivers)

1/3 bag of pasta (I used rigatoni cause that's what I had)

1. Boil Pasta water

2. Put Olive oil in a pot and heat, when the oil is warm add the dried oregano

3. Add carrots and cook for awhile

4. Add mushrooms and cook for awhile

5. Add salt and continue cooking

6. Add tomatoes, more salt, honey and pepper. Adjust the taste to your liking.

7. Cook for a bit till a lot of the water has burned off. Then rip the basil leaves into shreds and add that to the pot.

8. After the pasta has finished cooking and been drained off, add the sauce and pasta together

9. Serve and sprinkle with parmesan slivers.

10. Try really hard to make sure your brother doesn't eat everything, but give up when you realize he hasn't had cheese in over 4 weeks.

(I couldn't eat the finished product at the time, but Ambrish's verdict was that it was really good.)

Total time (and I wasn't trying to speed) 40 mins tops. But that could have been sped up if I wasn't wasting time in the kitchen, or was multitasking or was a little more organized on Tuesday morning.

The fastest marinara sauce I've ever made - Less time that it takes to make Pasta. (Maybe next time we'll feature that)

So my question to the various people reading this. Let me know how you make a quick, minimal shopping marinara sauce. (I want people to use the comments! Please? If I put another picture of my niece tomorrow?)

Corn nu Shaak and a Strange Pasta Dish

First of all - what is shaak? Well shaak is a traditional Indian style vegetable dish. It can either be dry or liquidy. Dry shaak is more like a spicy saute, where as liquidy shaak is more like a stew.

So today's dinner started off with two thoughts - the first was - I have a fresh corn in the fridge and I should use it before it goes bad. The second thought was I have sweet potato bisque (from trader joe's) and I'm just not in the mood for soup, so how can I use it.

So we'll start with the corn. I decide to make corn nu shaak - which means shaak with corn. This shaak contains the following ingredients (Thanks to my buddy Prati for this recipe)

can of blended diced (or crushed tomatoes)

fresh corn, shucked and frozen corn (you can do all frozen)

the sauce consists of the following:

mustard seeds

cumin seeds

cayenne pepper

chick pea flour

crush peanuts

honey (can use sugar, brown is preferred, I like honey for tomato based sauces)

salt

and oil

So I heated the oil up (for a vaghar)

once the oil was warm, I added

mustard seeds - when they popped I added

cumin seeds, cayenne pepper, chick pea flour and crushed peanuts

I sauted them for a bit and as they finished cooking I added the blended tomatoes

let that cook for awhile, then add in the frozen corn and continue to cook - total cooking time - 20 mins or so - the corn should be cooked through.

add honey to cut the sour taste of the tomatoes and salt to taste.

Now the experiment - the sweet potato bisque from trader joes (so if it was winter time I would have gobbled this soup up in a day or two

This is the ingredients list - look soup without garlic or onions! But I had no desire to eat it. So I brain stormed with my buddy Ken and we came up with a casserole with penne pasta and the bisque used to make a sauce that mimicked cream sauce in texture and flavor.

So I boiled up some pasta - without oil!

and laid it out in a casserole dish, and used the pasta water water to make the sauce -

Trader Joe's sweet potato bisque

ground pepper

parmesan cheese - I recommend the good stuff, but I used both the big container and the good stuff (cause I ran out)

cayenne pepper

turmeric

salt to taste

water to thin the sauce

So I just threw the above into a pot, boiled it up for a bit, adjusted the flavor and added it to the casserole dish

then add the veggies - I only had purple carrots (you could use any carrots, or no carrots - it didn't add much to the dish other then veggies)

The carrots look a lot prettier then in this picture - they are really nice looking carrots - just purple!

I tossed everything together, sprinkled shredded provolone an top and popped into a 350º F oven and cooked for probably 20 - 30 min (everything is cooked except the carrots) you just want the sauce to thicken, the cheese to melt and the veggies to soften a bit.

Let it cool for a bit and serve

I serve with toasted bread crumbs (I later discovered this was not necessary but when I took the casserole out I felt it missing some texture, so I toasted it up, but upon eating it I realized it wasn't necessary at all)

So the verdict - yummy! It looks like pasta and dal, but its yummy! Pictures don't do the flavor justice. So pasta and a sweet potato sauce - Yummy and filling (though a little high on the carb factor, not a perfect meal)

Note on the purple carrots - the verdict is still out in my book if I like the carrots from the market, but research does say that more natural colors in one's diet ensures that we get a variety of useful chemical, including a variety of anti-oxidants (chemicals that help prevent DNA damage and thereby prevent cancer). In addition, in the wild carrots were never just the bright orange we associate them with, instead they came in a wide variety of shades. So celebrate diversity in vegetables. Don't let the media tell you what color your carrot should be.

(I want a blue carrot, blue anyone? See one recently?)