It’s midnight on Friday and after a few episodes of How I Met Your Mother and some pasta, I’m getting prepared for a crazy busy weekend of studying and homework before my vacation starts next Wednesday. If I haven’t mentioned it, I’m heading down to Largo, Fla., to visit my college friend Jordan. She graduated and moved down to live with her mom, so I’ll be flying out mid-next week to visit her and go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter for the first time! I’m beyond excited.
But, before vacation comes a lot of work. There’s been a lot of reading, paper writing and online exam taking. And, of course, the last thing you want to do before you fly cross-country in four days is go grocery shopping. So, Jake and I decided to see what we could come up with for dinner based on the sparse ingredients I’ve had around my kitchen. Here’s what we got:
Jake dove into my pasta book while I was finishing up work this afternoon. I usually have a lot of basic ingredients on hand, thanks to this awesome pallet shelf I installed when I moved in. Just in luck- I had semolina flour. We tried pasta a few weeks ago, when we had a friend come over, but the pasta press malfunctioned and Jake had to take it apart to get it working again. I think we nailed it this time.
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Pasta:
1 cup durum semolina
1 egg
1/2 tsp. dried chives
1/2 tsp. fresh cracked black pepper
Water as needed
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Pasta’s actually pretty easy. Just mix the dough together and knead it a lot. Feed small chunks of pasta through the machine, cranking it as you go to progressively flatten the dough out a little more each time, before feeding the dough through the fettuccine crank. We stopped at the “3” setting, and dried the finished noodles for about half an hour before boiling 8 to 9 minutes.
Jake was so concentrated on the pasta that he grabbed a jar of garlic and basil Rising Moon Organics pasta sauce. But I kind of took over, because if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right, right? Please please please experiment with the seasonings of this sauce. I’m a little bit of a haphazard cook, so I just threw in some of this and some of that until the sauce tasted good to me.
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Pasta sauce:
1 1/2 jars tomato paste
1/2 cup textured vegetable protein
1 tsp. basil
1/2 tsp. fresh cracked black pepper
3 tsp. raw, unrefined sugar
1 tsp. garlic
Water to reach desired consistency
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Cook over medium-low heat until sauce is warm and vegetable protein is no longer crunchy.
I loved it- it ended up being sweet and spicy, but not too spicy. I’m a bit of a wuss when it comes to downright hot food, but I do love fresh black pepper. The sauce complimented the pasta perfectly. We ended up finding some parmesan and mozzarella to toss on top too. Not bad for some last minute cooking while refusing to grocery shop before an out-of-state trip, right?
If you were wondering, we served the fettuccine with a side of red potatoes, boiled and then tossed with olive oil, salt, thyme, rosemary and of course, chives.
A little starchy, but still delicious. What’s the best you’ve come up with while trying to clean out your kitchen?
