Special Pasta Sauce

Chef Steven here again and back in action! Tonight's challenge: A pasta sauce to go over the last of the homemade pasta. We have no milk, no tomatoes, no tomato paste, etc. What we do have is butter, flour, coconut milk, and frozen boneless chicken. :-)

So, we'll see how it turns out. First, I heated some olive oil in a sauce pan, then added garlic cubes, salt, pepper, some marjoram and rosemary. After thawing the chicken in the microwave, I added it to the oil & spices and cooked both sides until a nice golden brown. :-) I then put the chicken in the oven at 375 degrees for 25 minutes. I might need to leave it in another 5 or 10 minutes longer.

In the meantime, I made a roux (don't know if that's spelled right) - butter and flour, right? Well, that's what I did. :-) I think I saw someone add milk to make a white sauce, but since I didn't have milk I added a small can of coconut milk. Turns out that coconut milk is pretty potent, and relatively thick. So I stirred in some water until it got to a nice thin consistency. Once it was thin enough, it was ready for me to add some parmesan cheese (from a can) and melt it in. I also added some salt and pepper. It's now waiting on low heat. It smells really good, but it's pretty rich. Good thing it's going over pasta! And the chicken, when it was on the stove top, smelled pretty light, so that might help cut some of the richness.

When the chicken is done, I'm going to slice it up and toss it with the sauce and some pasta. Then I'll see how it turned out! :-)

Up Next, on Iron Chef Steven....

This afternoon M and I watched another Iron Chef America episode. This time Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto made a waffle with the secret ingredient: curry.

Intrigued, I decided to try making my own curry waffles. So I did! I took the recipe for whole grain waffles that M and I have been using, and substituted a little flour with some curry and cinnamon. Then I made the waffles in the usual way. Also following in the Iron Chef's footsteps, I made my own syrup to go with it. Well, sort of. I combined a little water, some imitation maple syrup, and some honey in a small pot and cooked it down a bit on the stove top. This was way too sweet, so I added a little curry powder (Iron Chef Morimoto had also put curry powder in his syrup). I also sprinkled some powdered sugar on top of the waffle. When all is said and done, it's actually a pretty good dish. A little different for waffles, but not too different. Morimoto served ice cream on the side, and I bet that's a pretty good combination. I'm thinking in particular of cinnamon ice cream... Mmmmm... :-)

Pasta!!!

This evening I made pasta. Fetticine, to be precise. Home-made. From scratch. M and I had been talking a few days ago about making pasta from scratch. I really wanted to do it (I've been watching too many Iron Chef America episodes lately :-P), and we were curious if we could save money by making our own pasta vs. buying dried pasta in the store. One thing we weren't sure about was how many meals we could get out of a single batch - just how much pasta could we make with a certain amount of flour and eggs (that's all it is). So while M is on overnight call tonight, after I cleaned up the kitchen (which I had let get into a sorry state) I decided to make my first attempt at pasta this evening.

So, armed with Iron Chef Mario Batalli's pasta recipe, a will to put my (non-existent) culinary talents to the test, and a grumbling stomach (not the best way to begin making pasta, it turns out), I set to it. 3.5 cups of flour, 6 large eggs. Mix it together, kneed it, kneed it some more, kneed it a little more. Let it rest for 20 minutes (good thing, I was tired of kneeding). Then start rolling it out and shaping it. We don't have a pasta roller, so it was the old fashioned rolling pin for me! ...and I thought kneeding was hard! I spent about an hour getting the pasta rolled out and cut into strips of linguini (that's what I thought I was making). When that was all done, I put some water on to boil. Then I realized I didn't have any tomato sauce or diced tomatoes or in fact any thing with which to make a tomato sauce. Oh no! Not deterred by this ginormous mountain of a roadblock, with heroic vim I turned to the only place a hero can turn to in a situation like this. Google. And there I found my solution! I found a recipe for no-tomato pasta sauce that featured cauliflower. Suddenly remembering that we have frozen bags of veggies in the freezer, including some with cauliflower, I whipped out a sauce pan and heated some olive oil. Then I added some garlic cubes and finally dumped the veggies in. Then some salt and pepper and tamoline chili powder (my current favorite experimental spice). I decided my "white sauce" wasn't white enough, or voluminous enough, so I added some milk. Brought that to a boil and then reduced the heat and let it simmer. (Actually, I was distracted for a moment and didn't notice that the sauce pan began boiling over - so now I have to clean the kitchen again. :-)) Then I started cooking the pasta! In the end, I had fetticine (not linguini) and way too little sauce for it all. Let's just say this: 6 large eggs and 3.5 cups of flour makes a lot of pasta. So I put a healthy helping in a bowl and then poured all the sauce on top, mixed it up, and this is my dinner. :-)

All in all, I have learned two important lessons from this adventure, and two very important lessons:

1. The first important lesson is that making pasta entirely by hand and with a rolling pin is hard work. And it's the rolling and cutting that takes the longest amount of time (I spent about 90 minutes making pasta - not counting the cooking), and of that 20 minutes were spent letting the dough sit, and about 60 minutes were spent rolling it out and cutting it).
2. The second important thing I learned is that pasta is actually pretty darn easy to make. There were moments when I really didn't think this pasta was going to turn out.

1. The first really important lession is that you shouldn't put all your cut pieces of pasta into a dry bowl while you cut up the rest. By the time I got to the cooking part, it had all stuck together pretty badly. This was one of those times when I thought it wasn't going to turn out, but in the end the stuck-together chunks seem to have become unstuck during the cooking.
2. The second really imprtant lession is that fresh home-made pasta is awesome. It tastes really good even plain and doesn't need any kind of sauce! Granted, I am eating my healthy helping with sauce, but that's partly because the sauce was already made. I will probably try a small bowl later tonight or tomorrow and see if I think it needs sauce or not.

So that's that, ladies and gentlemen. Today I took on Iron Chef Mario Batalli at his own game and came out the winner!

Poetry!

It's been a while since I last wrote a poem. I've been trying to write something for a while now, but nothing has been forthcoming. Well, as you know from my other entries, I'm reading Alexander Pope - and loving it! It has inspired me to try again - and this time I have something to show for it (a sonnet)!

An Allegory on Speech

Each one the image of his Language bears,
Which must by slow degrees be waked from Death:
The child must learn that speech begins with Breath,
As life itself, and ends with One who hears;

Then learn the sounds, in syllables arrayed,
Forgetting, too, the foreign sounds he knew.
Behold! He speaks! The syllables were true:
"Aga hateepoo" and "tagee dalate"!

Poor child! Vain sentences devoid of sense!
They have the form of words, yet not the power.
The Father coaxes gently, hour by hour,
Not lacking grace for childish innocence,

Until he learns the tongue of God for men,
And - full of meaning - whispers thus: "Amen."

A Hymn from a Poem?

There's a well-known hymn (And can it be that I should gain?, by Charles Wesley) with the following verse:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

It was written in 1738. Now compare this verse with a section of Alexander Pope's (1717) poem Eloisa to Abelard:

In these lone walls (their days eternal bound)
These moss-grown domes with spiry turrets crowned,
Where awful arches make a noonday night,
And dim windows shed a solemn light;
Thy eyes diffused a reconciling ray,
And gleams of glory brightened all the day.

The context is quite different - Eloisa is describing her convent with and without Peter Abelard being around, whereas Wesley is describing man's slavery to sin until God intervenes - but the language is remarkably similar!