I found this in one of my Japanese cookbooks when I was looking for something quick that didn't require leaving the house for any ingredients. I always have bacon on hand (frozen in sets of 4 strips), and found some chopped spinach in my freezer from last summer's harvest. Soba is high in essential amino acids and antioxidents, as well as being one of my favourite kind of noodles. It has a nice bite to it and is takes less than half the time to cook that regular pasta takes. This was a little bit western and a little eastern, but mostly just delicious.
Soba with Bacon & Spinach (for 1):
100g soba noodles
2 tbsp olive oil
3 pieces bacon, cut in 1/2 cm strips
1/2 clove garlic, crushed
50g chopped spinach
2 tbsp soy sauce
salt & pepper
In a fry pan with olive oil, cook the bacon until crispy. Add the garlic and cook another couple of minutes before adding the spinach. Flavour with soy sauce, salt & pepper. While you are doing this cook the soba noodles in boiling water for 4 minutes, then drain and toss with the spinach/bacon mixture.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Sobagetti
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Camping Dinner #2
Really, cooking on the road is a lot like cooking at home, it just takes a bit more advance planning. We decided that we wanted to take one of our favourite dinners (Apple Pork Chops), change it up a bit by breading the pork chops, serve it with a side of herb and mushroom pasta, and do it all over the campfire. No problem right? Well, for the most part no problem, you just need to work on timing everything to finish about the same time without knowing what kind of temperatures you are working with.
We figured the pork chops would take the longest to cook, so we did all our prep, put the chops on, and then worked everything else around that. Breading the pork chops in panko bread crumbs was easy, we just dipped them in an egg wash and then shook them around in the bag.
While we started the chops in the frying pan on the fire, we also started the water for the pasta going, and had a pot of mushrooms and onions sauteing. When the water was boiling, and the veggies were ready, we just moved them a bit off to the side to keep warm until it was go time. The pasta that Brooke picked up from the Italian Center was dry, but still had a cook time of only three minutes since it was extra skinny spaghetti.
Once the pork chops were finished cooking, we put them off to the side to rest, and sauteed the apples in the pan. At the same time, we popped the pasta in to cook, and threw some cream and chopped herbs from the garden in with the sauteed veggies to create a nice mushroom cream sauce.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Pasta with Smoked Salmon
Another smoked salmon meal from last week. This was super tasty and was pretty light for a creamy pasta. I used Gnocchi no.85 noodles that I picked up on sale at the Italian Centre a couple of weeks ago, but anything goes with this. Quick, easy, and perfect with a glass of white wine.
Smoked Salmon Pasta (serves 2):
200g pasta
1/2 medium onion, chopped
2 tsp butter
2 cloves garlic
60g light cream cheese
white wine
2 large handfuls spinach, cooked & chopped
4 slices smoked wild salmon
salt & pepper
Bring a large pot of salted water to boil for the pasta. While that is heating, add the onion, garlic, and butter to a small pan and cook over med-low heat for 5-8 minutes. Once the water has come to the boil, plunge the spinach in for a minute and then scoop it out with a sieve and add the pasta to the boiling water to cook. Drain the spinach and chop. While the pasta is cooking, add the cream cheese and white wine and reduce until you reach your desired consistency for the sauce. Season with salt and pepper and stir in the chopped spinach to heat. When the pasta is ready, drain and add to the pan with the sauce. Finally, stir in the smoked salmon and serve.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Adventures in Pastamaking II
Some of you may remember that Brooke and I made our first foray into the land of homemade pasta making a good while back. Well, it took some work, so we took a little break before trying our luck a second time. We used the same recipe for the pasta itself as last time but the process was quite different this go round.
For one, we used better tools. Instead of kneading and kneading, we combined the ingredients using my Kitchenaid food processor. Oh glorious invention! After combining, we could just kneed in the additional water to adjust the pasta consistency. As well, we borrowed a Kitchenaid pasta making attachment from a generous friend, and were spared the incessant whirring of our $10 pasta machine (which will likely be $10 worth of garbage as it turns out). By using the lasagna noodle setting, we rolled out ribbons of pasta that were then used to make homemade ravioli.
Brooke and I wanted to try some very different fillings this go round, and so we also enlisted the hands of another willing partner in crime, so that we had three hands going for three fillings (and then we divided them up at the end). Brooke picked a pea and sage filling, our mystery guest chose a squash and cinnamon filling, and I picked a crab, shrimp and cream cheese filling. The first two fillings were pretty much as described above (simple fillings with few ingredients). Here is what I used for my crab and shrimp filling: 
- 1/2 package of cream cheese
- 1 small tin of crab meat
- 10-12 shrimp, cooked
- zest and juice of half a lemon
- 1 tsp fresh dill
- pepper to taste
Combine all ingredients in a food processor until smooth and creamy. This yielded a very lemony, dilly filling. Flavors could be decreased to simply highlight the seafood more, and the seasonings less.
All of our raviolis turned out to be quite mild in flavour, and would lend themselves well to being topped with a sauce to add some depth. For the squash version, we fried it as opposed to steaming it, which made it taste quite a lot like pumpkin pie. It would make a very interesting dessert if done larger and plated with whipped cream for a dinner party.
The ravioli making was a LOT of work, and I think I would be more likely to just go with a deconstructed version in the future (just layering pasta with filling and sauce), and passing it off as hip. It was a fun exercise though, and after the fact we came up with lots of other filling ideas. It is a good activity to do with girlfriends for an afternoon, and I would say best done sitting at a table (we had sore feet) with a glass of wine.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Beef & Leek Udon Soup
This soup is so quick and easy to make that I seriously made it before work this morning. It's about 15 minutes from start to finish, and that's including boiling and chopping time. The only thing that needs to be made in advance is the kaeshi, but that can also be purchased at most asian grocery stores - I usually have it on hand all summer, as soba is one of my favourite quick summer meals. I am looking forward to a tasty and healthy lunch today!
Beef & Leek Udon Soup (serves 2):
200g dried udon noodles
1 tbsp vegetable oil
150g beef, sliced thinly
1 leek, thinly sliced diagonally
1 inch chopped fresh ginger
50 ml kaeshi
600 ml water
2 tbsp miso
pepper
Bring a pot of water to the boil then add the udon noodles and cook for 6 minutes. Empty the noodles into a sieve and run through cold water, then set aside. In the same pot, heat the oil and saute the beef and leek for a couple of minutes, then add the ginger, kaeshi, and water. Slowly mix in the miso, ensuring there are no lumps, then add the noodles and heat for another 2 minutes. Once the miso is in, make sure the soup does not come to a boil.
This makes 2 generous servings, and you can top with pepper to serve.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Sausage and Feta Pasta
Yup, still in the cooking slump. Pasta is right up there with stir-frys in terms of being an easy and flexible alternative for a week night dinner. It is even easier when you have made homemade pasta recently, as it cooks even faster than the dried stuff (even from frozen, you are only looking at about 4 minutes). I hit up the farmers market this Sat in an attempt to get something that I knew would be relatively fresh and locally produced so that I could get rid of some of my winter flavour blahs. Although buying meat this way can be a bit more pricey than the store, I kept it very affordable by opting for sausage. I have never made my own sausage (I don't have the stuff to do it, and honestly there are so many good ones at the local farmer's market that I don't see the need to). As the star of tonight's dish, I had some sundried tomato and chive sausage. I wish I had noted which farmer it was from, but I didn't. It was just over $6 for 10-12 breakfast sized sausage, so not bad for meat.
To start with, I get a big pot of water boiling so that it is all ready for the pasta when I hit the T -4 minute mark. Next, I grabbed a big frying pan and started to pan fry six of the sausages. When they were fully cooked, I got the pasta going, and removed the sausage from the pan to cut into smaller chunks. Cutting after cooking is the easiest in my opinion seeing as the sausage stays together, but sometimes I opt to cut off the casing and make little meatballs with the sausage filling. Once cut up, I returned the sausage chunks to the pan with some plain tomato and basil sauce (just grabbed from the pantry). I like to add the sauce to the pan because it kind of deglazes the pan a bit while warming, so that all the flavor the sausages would have left behind becomes part of the sauce. By this time, the pasta is ready to be drained, and tossed into the pan to get mixed around with the sauce and sausage. Finally, it gets plated and topped with crumbled feta (as much as you like).
The whole thing takes my under 10 minutes to make. Even on days when I am so hungry I have a bad case of grouchiness I can usually manage that much time before eating.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Adventures in Pastamaking I
After our success in making gnocchi last month, Court & I decided we wanted to try making pasta from scratch. The only thing stopping us was lack of a pasta machine, and no desire to spend a lot of money on something we didn't know we'd enjoy enough to do more than once or twice. A quick look on Kijiji and I found one for $10 (electric, unfortunately) - we were on our way.
I wasn't sure if special flour was required for pasta, so I stopped by the Italian Centre Shop and they did have imported flour with a pasta recipe on the back which we decided use (Thank you, Google Translate!).
Fresh Pasta (6 servings):
200g Semola di grano duro
250g Farina tipo ''00''
3 whole eggs
1 tbsp olive oil
enough tepid water to make the dough moist but not sticky
Sift both flours together, form a well in the centre and mix in the eggs and oil; the result looks a little like breadcrumbs. Now to add the water - this is where you need to be careful and where we made our mistake: I added too much water as the dough was very difficult to get together at first. I would recommend adding a little at a time and kneading it in, never adding too much. As soon as it feels the least bit sticky you've added too much water. Not to worry though, if you add to much the dough is still salvageable. We ended up having to knead in extra flour, and every time we thought it had absorbed as much flour as it could it was able to take more. The dough was very stiff, and once we got the dough right it finally started going through the machine properly.
The pasta mac
hine turned out to be the loudest thing I have ever heard - worse than a food processor. The shrill motor eventually made me give up on using the machine and I hand-rolled the final bit of dough (which I wouldn't recommend as the stiffness of the dough made it nearly impossible).
That night, I made Linguine Aglio e Olio from David Rocco's recipe. Tasty! This is a super easy dinner to make when you have no ingredients in the house. I can't wait for our second attempt, as hopefully we've got all the mistakes out of our system. Plus, fortunately, a borrowed pasta attachment for a KitchenAid mixer. Wish us luck!
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Boursin Pasta
I know it's warm here for Edmonton, but having just come back from California, it is still feeling a bit wintery in comparison. I miss California and wish I could go back there and live all winter long, but alas, that is not a possibility until I become independently wealthy or old enough to retire. My husband is still on vacation for another day, so he was on supper duty tonight, and he whipped up one of our favorite quick comfort meals - Boursin Pasta.
This recipe originally comes from a cookbook called Fresh Food Fast, which I borrowed (for a very extended period) from Brooke until she stole it back. It is a great cookbook, but I can't seem to find it anywhere to get a copy of my own. This recipe is so simple that we don't really need to book to make it, and adjusting the quantities up or down to your tastes is a good plan.
Boursin is a brand of cheese that I have had great success in finding at pretty much any grocery store. It's nice as a spread on crostini if you want a super quick appetizer, and can be used a lot like a goat cheese or savory cream cheese. This time we used the pepper flavored cheese, but my favorite is the garlic and herb.
Boursin Pasta (for 3 or 4):
Spaghetti for 3 or 4 people
1 package Boursin Cheese
1/2 pack of bacon chopped
1 zucchini chopped - I like a larger julian
1/2 cup cream
Start the pasta boiling as per the directions on the package. In a saute pan, start to cook the bacon. When it starts to get crispy, drain off most of the grease, add in the zucchini and stir so that it is coated in bacon grease. Add the cheese in and break it up a bit so that it can melt in with the rest, and add the cream. Simmer the sauce until it is as thick as you would like it (this won't take long). Toss the pasta in the sauce and enjoy.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Homestyle Mac & Cheese
I halved this recipe and it fed two people quite generously:
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon flour
½ cup breadcrumbs
2 tablespoons Parmesan grated
2cups milk
1 tablespoon grainy mustard
250g Oka grated (I found Oka at Superstore in the cooling bin with the goat cheese and brie)
280g old cheddar (3yr or older) grated
ground black pepper
500g fusilli or macaroni
Preheat oven to 400F. Boil water and cook pasta. While pasta is cooking, melt butter in a saucepan and add flour to make a roux, then gradually whisk in the milk. Add mustard, Oka, cheddar and pepper to taste.
Mix pasta and cheese sauce and pour into oven proof dish. Mix breadcrumbs and Parmesan and sprinkle over the pasta mixture, bake in oven for 15 to 20 minutes (less time for a runnier sauce).I loved this dish, and it is so quick and easy to make. I think it would even be a fun starter for a dinner party if you made little individual servings in ramekins. I used more breadcrumbs than the recipe call for just because I like having a good crunchy crust to go with the creaminess of the cheese and pasta.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Ninja Lasagna
Cooking for two brothers while growing up who both tended to avoid most vegetables led me to get a bit sneaky. Lasagna (and spaghetti) has such strong flavours that it is quite easy to mask most vegetables in it. Getting a food processor made this even easier - because if you can't see it it must not be there. What mushrooms?
I'm in budget-mode after the holidays, so I really skimped on the cheese and I also used a 50/50 mixture of pork and beef to keep costs down.
Ninja Lasagna:
250 g ground pork
250 g ground beef
1/2 large onion
3+ cloves garlic
800 ml tomato sauce
1 chopped tomato
2-3 medium carrots
1/2 small zucchini
1/2 small red pepper
handful of broccoli florets
handful of cauliflower florets
10 button mushrooms
1 1/2 tbsp dried basil
2 bay leaves
salt & pepper
~12-15 lasagna sheets
250 ml cottage cheese
350 g mozzarella, shredded
In a large saucepan brown the pork and beef with the onion and garlic. Drain the majority of fat and add the tomato sauce and tomato. Puree the vegetables in a food processor and add to the pan. (Alternately, you could just finely chop the vegetables if your family is less picky than mine.) Add the basil, bay leaves, and salt & pepper and bring to a simmer over low heat; simmer for 2 hours uncovered.
This time I accidentally bought no-cook lasagna sheets, so it was even less work although I don't prefer them. It's best to lay out the sheets before you cook them to guesstimate how many you'll need for your dish - mine took around 12 for 3 layers of pasta. Lay out the layers in the following order: pasta, sauce, cottage cheese, mozzarella. Cover with foil and bake in a 375F/190C oven for 30 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for another 10-15 minutes.
Once cool I divide
d it into 9 portions and froze 8 of them. A better idea for freezing would be to arrange the layers in individual portions and freeze before cooking, as then you'd be able to cook each portion as you wanted it instead of just reheating it. Next time I'll read my packages more carefully, as having the no-cook sheets prevented this (simply due to the shape of my containers).
Monday, January 5, 2009
Pasta con Carciofi
...sounds much better than Artichoke Pasta. And I feel fancier writing it in Italian - win/win! This sauce is surprisingly creamy for basically being made of minced artichokes, and while there is parmesan in the sauce it can definitely be scaled down if you want to keep this light. (I'm always scaling cheese up because I love it so much.) I'm not super into pasta, so it really means something when I say I love this. As Court would say, it's pastalicious!
Pasta with Artichokes:
4 artichoke hearts (~1/2 can)
20 g pancetta or bacon, cubed
1/2 small onion, sliced thin
3 cloves garlic
olive oil
salt & pepper
25 g fresh parmesan, grated
150 g pasta
Put a large pot of water with salt on the stove to boil. While waiting for that, either mince 3 of the artichokes very finely or pop them in the food processor with some olive oil - this will form the base of the sauce. Slice the remaining artichoke heart. In a fry pan over medium heat, warm some olive oil and cook the onion and pancetta for around 5 minutes until the onion is soft. Add the garlic, artichokes, and salt & pepper and lower the heat. While the pasta is cooking just keep the sauce warm, adding some of the boiling pasta water as needed to keep the sauce from thickening up too much. You can also toss in the parmesan at this point. As soon as the pasta is al dente, drain and add to the fry pan to coat in the sauce. Quickly plate & serve immediately. This serves 2 very generously, or 4 as a starter or side.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Toshikoshi Soba - Year-Crossing Noodles
The holiday season always makes me feel a little bit of a glutton, as I do a lot of sitting around and eating delicious food but very little exercise. With the new year almost here, it's time to get back on track and I was inspired by reading Maki's post at Just Hungry. I love soba noodles, but normally think of them as a summer meal as they are fantastic served cold. This was super tasty and super healthy, and has left me feeling a little bit better about myself.
Toshikoshi Soba (makes 1 serving):
50g soba noodles (mine was wrapped in bundles of 100g)
1 cup/250 ml dashi
1/4 cup/40 ml soy sauce
3 tbsp mirin or sake
2-3 tbsp sugar
toppings of choice
Heat the mirin to a simmer and dissolve the sugar, then add the soy sauce and dashi and heat while the noodles are cooking.
Add the soba to boiling water and cook 4 minutes, then drain and rinse with cold water to rinse the starch off and stop them from cooking further. Place the soba in a bowl, add your toppings, and pour the hot soup over. For toppings, I used spinach, bean sprouts, kamaboko, green onion, and bonito flakes because that's what I had in my fridge. Really, you could use whatever comes to mind - I think next time I'll try it with prawns.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Stroganoff for a Cold Winter Night
I know this is nothing compared to how cold it is going to get later in winter, but I am FREEZING!!! I had some meatballs in the freezer that my mom gave me when I was sick a while ago, so I pulled them out for a hot comfort food supper on a night when both my husband and I were working. I got home in the evening, and had dinner for two (and a packed lunch) made less than half an hour later. Pasta is a pretty safe bet for a quick hot meal. I started the water boiling right away so that it would be ready for pasta when I was ready to count down to dinner, and then I got working on my sauce.
Stroganoff Sauce: (sauce for about 4)
2 tbsp butter
1/2 cup chopped onions
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
2 tbsp flour
1/2 cup beef stock
1/2 cup sour cream
Once I have finished all my chopping, I put my pasta on so it will be ready close to the same time as the sauce.
In a large frying pan or electric fryer sauté the onions and mushrooms in the butter until the mushrooms start to brown a little. Take the heat off, and dust the mixture with 1 1/2 tbsp of the flour. Mix it until it is all well combined. Return the pan to heat, and add the beef broth, stirring it in a little at a time so that the flour does not separate. Allow it to thicken for a minute or two. Stir the last 1/2 tbsp of flour into the sour cream, and add that mixture to the rest of the sauce. Finally, add the meatballs and cover them with sauce so that they defrost/warm up quickly (about 5 minutes).
