Our summer in Mirrielees is ending this weekend, and so does cooking. This last week is mostly just running down our stock of food, so I'm pretty sure there will be little to speak of. I did anticipate, though, that we would have pasta meals ahead, but this time, instead of getting spaghetti sauce, I figured we could work a little harder and make our own.
It's a little unfortunate that Lee doesn't like tomatoes, but it was the best base I could think of, so I got some nice tomatoes on the vine at Safeway, then found a recipe that we could probably achieve. We don't have fresh basil, but we do have Italian seasoning, which I highly recommend for any lightly stocked kitchen. It sounds, smells, and tastes classy, but is cheap and greatly reduces the number of ingredients you need on hand. Huge win.
Our other important trick here was the red pepper flakes. These are probably more of a specialty item, but they're often stocked at important college food sources, like pizza places. I myself stole them from the fridge at the office after apparently ordered pizza but couldn't take the heat.
So I didn't take any pictures along the way, but it went well. I learned on the first tomato that there actually is a wrong way to cut them where you end up squeezing all of the juice out trying to puncture the skin. Going tip first seemed to help afterwards, but I'll probably ask my mom or sisters for future reference about how to do that right.
One thing I liked about this recipe is that it isn't intricate. You prepare everything (mainly being cutting) then throw it all into a pan and let it sit.
I realize my camera has definitely gotten redder and looks fuzzier than I remember, but here's the final product. It was a little watery since my difficulty in cutting means a lot of the juice drained from the tomatoes, but I'll be more adept next time.
For breakfast on Sunday, I knew I needed to return to my #1 food: the omelet. It was easy and very tasty. This time, I even managed to slide half of the omelet off the pan and fold over. I was really proud of myself.
And for my final act on Sunday night, I went with my friend Ben to a Mongolian BBQ place in Mountain View on Castro St. It was one of the first places we saw, and our desire to get good value on our meal attracted us to the buffet. I think that Mongolian BBQ is all about the sauce, and being a buffet, it had to be beaten as well. Screw the carbs, grab the more valuable stuff and try lots of sauces. Highly recommended if you happen to be in the area.
So I think that'll probably be it for this summer. Just because I realize that a lot of my posts are just captions on pictures, here's a little content for you on what I learned about cooking this summer:
1) There's a lot of failure when you try new recipes. You can avoid a lot of that failure by actually thinking about what the dish will taste like when you're done. Sadly, a lot of what we cooked was determined by what we had in stock, and I was excited enough to see something that we could do, worried only about what it'd make after that. This probably could've been avoided by
2) Plan meals. A lot of our meals were figured out the day of. Which is fine if you're well-stocked and have lots of fresh ingredients. That doesn't work so well if you don't have a lot in your fridge and a good amount of the rest is frozen. Preferably, I would have an idea what I wanted to eat for the next week when I went to the grocery store. That way, instead of finding recipes to fit my food, I could find food to fit my recipes.
That sounds really cheesy and cliche.
3) Cooking isn't nearly as time-consuming and messy as it sounds. I was a little surprised with the chicken pasta recipe when there weren't a ton of dishes to wash, though there's really no reason why it should have. I needed a pot for pasta, a knife and cutting board for the ingredients, and a pan, spatula, and top to throw everything into. That's simple. And since Lee was in a rush in that meal as well, we multitasked and got the sauce done while the pasta was cooking, making cooking no slower than using a jar of Ragu.
Granted, it does take planning, and it does take more work than a frozen pizza, and there are certainly times when I care about having an extra 5 minutes or don't feel like moving a fingernail. But cooking has been worth it this summer, and I'm glad to have gone through the effort.
