Angle hair pasta.
I was preparing a late night snack. Early morning, actually, but the exact time is irrelevant, sensible people were already asleep hours previous to this.
I don't know why I had the very thin spaghetti measured onto a flexible cutting surface.
It was there. That's why.
Those surfaces are for cutting up food that you want to channel into a tube-like surface to pour into a pan or a pot, things like diced onion or chopped vegetables. They're handy cutting surfaces, not for delivering pasta that needn't be cut. But that's where I put the pasta strands, on the flexible cutting surface.
Moving the pasta from the work surface to the pot the pasta strands slid right off onto the floor. Correcting the tilt made them spill out the opposite side. Now the entire load is dumped onto the floor. It looks like pick-up sticks X 1 million. Hay strewn across the entire kitchen floor.
I actually thought I could salvage it.
For about 2 seconds.
The water was boiling away full blast.
Lost cause. I swept them up. Except the strands wouldn't sweep up, they barely rolled the direction being swept, they settle into the texture of the floor, and they're criss-crossed together so they don't sweep into the dust pan, and worse, they stick like needles into the broom. Each element of sweeping them is complicated by them being stiff needle-like strands. They need to be broken to be swept into the dust pan but breaking them makes them even more difficult to sweep. Vacuuming works but they need to be broken even more.
The water is boiling like mad. And it's two o'clock in the morning. It took a very long time to clean up the mess and no small amount of vacuuming noise.
I did invent a new pasta technique. New to me anyway.
Cook garlic briefly in butter and olive oil.
Add shallow water for pasta into the flat pan.
Cook the thin pasta. It doesn't fit, but so what, in one minute it bends and can be forced to fit.
Its starch begins a thin sauce. And it cooks quickly.
Grate some hard cheese.
Off the heat, the water no longer boiling, break an egg into the water and stir vigorously and thoroughly so so the egg cooks evenly in the water and thickens the sauce further smoothly without scrambling.
Add the cheese, and now the pasta starch + egg + cheese all form a very nice sauce.
Altogether an excellent early morning snack.
10 comments:
I have been doing the cold water pasta technique, on both thin and thick pasta. You get the biggest pan you have (that can hold the spaghetti across it). Add cold water (enough to cover). Add pasta and salt. Bring to boil. It takes less time and the pasta does not stick together (you do have to stir it a bit when the pasta starts getting flexible, just to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pan).
I always break linguine and other long pasta in half prior to cooking. Easier to cook and eat. Learned this from my old man who learned it from his.
I throw it into the rice cooker, the only fine point being timing it right so that there's still water left unsteamed and unabsorbed when you turn it off, lest a lot stick to the bottom.
Add salsa and eat.
There's spaghetti sold in half-length boxes now, if you want to pay extra.
When the kids were little, they dropped some M&Ms on the floor. They began picking them up and eating them, so I stopped them, and told them that we weren't so poor that we needed to eat food from off the floor. I ate them, because I didn't want them to go to waste. Cheap isn't the same thing as poor.
I've got some angel hair and sauce (with meatballs) in the fridge. That was going to be lunch, but I hit a groove working on a project, so I skipped lunch. It'll be there tomorrow for breakfast. Cold. Pot roast for dinner tonight, while I enjoy (I hope) the NHL game. Roast beef sandwich for lunch tomorrow. Cold. With ketchup.
At two o'clock in the morning you could have invited some stoners to eat it straight off the floor. No cooking necessary.
rh, I consider the spaghetti breaking an upper body workout.
windbag, I've been flipping to the Cup game. Hope you're a Blues fan.
Bruins. Trying to decide who's going to play the role of Bobby Orr in this historic rematch.
I don't have over-the-air television, so I can't watch sports of any sort, but I have two things to say about this hockey season - the season was over when the 'Canes were swept and the Stanley Cup should never reside above the Mason Dixon line. That is all.
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