Seafood pasta

I invented "seafood pasta" many years ago when my husband and I were both working and we required our middle-school boys to each cook dinner once a week.  I prepared a cookbook for their guidance, including info such as which pan to use and how soon before dinner to start working.  Seafood pasta had the advantage of being prepared solely from cans and boxes (plus an onion) and not taking very long.

My standard seafood pasta recipe called for a can of tuna, a can of clams (or a second can of tuna), an onion, a can or two of diced tomatoes, depending on how many people were eating, and some pasta.  You can probably figure out how to put those ingredients together, and it doesn't really matter what order you do them in.

As we have become a bit more culinarily adventurous in our old age, the seafood pasta recipe has evolved.  The other night I found myself about as close to ground zero as a cook can be -- practically nothing in the fridge.  We didn't really want to go to the store so I searched around in the cupboard and came up with seafood pasta.  But this was a more exotic version than in the Mom Cookbook.

I did have an onion, so I cut it up and sauteed it in a big pan.  Meanwhile I got to opening cans: a can of artichoke hearts, a can of tuna, a tiny can of anchovies.  I had garlic in the fridge, so I cut that up too.  And best of all, I had a few leftover tomatoes that I had roasted in the oven for a couple of hours several days ago.

To the slow-cooked onions I added the artichoke hearts, allowing them to brown a bit in olive oil over fairly high heat.  Then the anchovies in their oil, stirring and poking with a wooden spoon until they dissolved into a dark, salty ooze.  The chopped garlic went in toward the end of that process, just before I added a third-bottle of wine left over from our reception at the art gallery the night before, and the pasta.

While the pasta cooked in the flavorful sauce, I added the leftover tomatoes and a bit of boiling water toward the end to make sure it didn't end up too dry.  I love this one-pot pasta method; much easier than making the sauce and the pasta separately, also more energy-efficient and resulting in fewer dirty dishes.

Years ago I would have used one or two anchovy fillets, and even today felt a bit reckless using the whole can.  But that turned out to be the secret ingredient: it gave a salty, sophisticated gourmet edge to the pasta.

We never use grated cheese when our pasta contains seafood, so we needed the oomph to come from the anchovies and garlic.  And they delivered plenty of that!  I'll remember this combination and do it again.

Improvisation on vacation

I welcome the opportunity to improvise in the kitchen, but usually that has to do with ingredients and cooking techniques.  When you go on vacation to a rented kitchen, however, you often get to improvise with equipment as well.

We've been going to rented condos for many years and I always take along a box or two of stuff that I might need -- cutting board, good teflon frying pan, sharp knife, lots of kitchen towels, that sort of thing.  Generally if I have brought along a particular tool that means I'll find two of them in the rented kitchen, and if I have failed to bring it along, there won't be one there.

This year our kitchen has been the most sparsely equipped we've seen in a long time.  Only two dishtowels, for instance -- hey, I go through two in a typical meal -- but fortunately I brought ten of my own.

No hot pads (good thing I brought lots of dishtowels).  No salt and pepper (I brought a pepper grinder, but we're cutting down on sodium this week). 

No covers for most of the cooking pans.

No potato masher.

Not to worry.  Improvisation is good for the soul.  In fact, that wine bottle made an excellent potato masher, maybe even better than my orthodox one at home.

Improvisation in green

It's getting hot, and I'm trying to get into my summer eating habits, so I got a big bunch of parsley at the grocery (ours is growing nicely but not big enough for a harvest the size I had in mind) and picked a bunch of mint and chives from the garden and set out to make tabouli.

I washed and de-stemmed the herbs and whizzed them up in the Cuisinart, then put bulgur to soak in warm water.  Oops, not as much bulgur as I wanted -- and after a huge search of the pantry we realized there was no backup package.

I fretted while the bulgur reconstituted itself, realizing that I had way too much green stuff as a proportion of brown stuff.  Parsley and mint are wonderful, but they need a fair amount of some relatively neutral base to play against.

And then inspiration struck.  I got some red lentils and cooked them, which takes less than a half hour.  Perhaps I was distracted, because I got the cooking wrong.  When I returned to the stove, there wasn't enough liquid in the pan to make soup, and the lentils were too far toward the mush end of the spectrum to turn them into a salad, so I poured a can of chicken broth over the top.  Then half of my chopped green herbs went into the pot.

The next day I heated it up and added some spinach from the salad towel in the fridge.

Halfway between soup and porridge, it was a wonderful bowl of springtime.  The big handful of herbs, plus the chicken broth, were all the seasoning it needed.  And the tabouli came out perfect with the rest of the herbs, in just the right balance of green and brown.

Best improvisational dinner

May I have the envelope please --

I had made a red sauce/ragu for pasta earlier in the week but there was about a cup and a half left over.  When a beautiful huge eggplant appeared in our kitchen, it was time for creative improvisation.  I waited too long in the afternoon to do my classic eggplant parmigiana, which starts by nuking the whole eggplant in the microwave, then assembling a casserole and baking it.

So I sliced some of the eggplant and sauteed it in olive oil in a skillet.  I chose an ovenproof skillet thinking that I might finish the dish under the broiler without having to decant it.  But then I figured out an even simpler way.

After the eggplant slices were cooked through and nicely browned, I pushed them to the side of the pan and poured in the leftover red sauce.  Spread about half of it out on the bottom of the pan and arranged the eggplant slices on top.

I covered the top of the slices with breadcrumbs and a bit of parmesan cheese.  (If you don't want to get out the tools for grated cheese and risk it going all over the counter, just use a vegetable peeler and shave off very thin hunks of cheese.  Much faster, and it's going to melt anyway.)

Then I spooned the other half of the leftover sauce on top of the eggplant, and topped that with some leftover shredded mozzarella.  Perhaps you wonder about those pasta shells -- they were left over too, mixed in with the red sauce.  Not enough to really count as a carbohydrate, but once the cheese got melted over the top we didn't even realize they were there.

Since the sauce was cold I knew it would have to stay on the stove for at least several minutes, and I was afraid it would dry out or even burn.  So I poured some red wine in the bottom of the pan.

The skillet was too wide for any of my large pot lids, so I put the biggest mesh spatter guard over the pan, then perched the biggest lid on top.  It didn't seal the pan, but certainly helped keep the heat in.  Eight minutes later everything had heated through, the cheese was melted and it was ready to eat, with only one dirty skillet.  The wine had cooked away, leaving the red sauce hot but not very wet.  In fact, this dish had exactly the consistency of the best restaurant parmigiana.

We rated this dish about as high as you can go, which was nice because I made up every step as I went along. If I had to write up an ingredient list, most of them would show the quantity "as much as you have."  Not sure the stars (and the leftovers) will ever be in this conjunction again -- will we ever get to do it again???

Ingenuity

So when you find yourself in a motel room after a long day on the road, and you're too tired to go out to dinner (besides, you had a big lunch), and you realize you have cheese and crackers and baby carrots and beer in the cooler, that seems like a pretty good argument for snacks in the room.

But wait -- how to cut the cheese? 

In the olden days, we used to travel equipped with corkscrew, church key, pocket knife, scissors and other useful accessories always in our cosmetic kits, but having lost too many of said accessories to airport security on various continents, we have gotten negligent.  It's just too much trouble to put tools into your kit when you're traveling by car, then take them out when you're going by plane.

Had it been just one of us alone in the motel, we probably would have just taken bites out of the cheese.  But we weren't quite that desperate.

The solution:

We had two room keys, so didn't have to find out whether cheese adversely affects the magnetic strip.

Improvisational rice

I ranted recently on my other blog about the product police making my favorite brand of salsa disappear from the shelves.  In search of a substitute, I bought three different varieties to try.  The first one failed the test, leaving me with an almost full jar of red stuff that we didn't particularly like.  Struck by the spirit of improvisation, I decided to make it part of our dinner.

Hauled out the rice cooker, made a one-cup batch using the normal proportions of rice and water, then dumped in about half the jar of salsa, maybe a half cup.  The improvisation was a success -- the rice looked good and tasted good.  According to the label, this added about 25 calories to the dinner.

Although the salsa was only "medium" in hotness, the rice was spicier than I would have expected.  It made a good complement to pork chops and broccoli.  I would even serve it to company.