sylke

The husband really likes fat in his meals. Enough so that he gets actually grumpy when I make tasty but low fat dinners. He apologizes for it, he feels bad that he can't have the meals I want to cook without feeling satisfied, but the emotional change in him when he just puts a big ol' pat of butter on bread after a lowfat meal is astounding enough that I'm willing to try and find a compromise: healthy ingredients, but with at least some forms of fat for his sake.

Tonight's dinner was Pasta Primavera. Three sources of fat: olive oil, butter, and half-and-half to help form a "light" cream sauce. Relatively speaking, of course. Hey, at least it wasn't like an Alfredo. Despite feeling like I messed a few things up, it came out pretty tasty and satisfying, and I feel like I at least fed the boy his vegetables. This is how I actually made it tonight:

1/2 bunch young/thin asparagus, cut into ~2" pieces
1 yellow squash, cut into slices
1/2 zucchini, cut into spears
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 carrots, cut into thin, 2" slices (kind of like julienne but without the last cutting step)
linguine (maybe a half-box equivalent, we used handmade pasta from Rome [NY])
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp butter
1 cp half-and-half
basil
salt and pepper to taste
Parmesan cheese

Heat olive oil in a large frying pan, medium-high. Sauté the garlic until it just starts to color, about one minute. Assume the water for the pasta is on the verge of boiling because it looks pretty close. Add all the veggies and the butter, season to taste with S&P and basil, and sauté until tender-crisp, about 10 minutes. Realize you were way off on the water, and start to accept that dinner's not going as planned. Pull out meat thermometer to test pasta pot, realize water is still 20 degrees shy of boiling. Pout. Add the half and half to the vegetable pan, let simmer, covered, for another 5 minutes. Decide the water's close enough now, and add pasta. Uncover vegetables, simmer sauce for another 3 minutes to reduce. Turn off burner and hope the sauce will thicken a bit as it cools because it's gonna be another 10 minutes at least on the pasta. Tell yourself that the squash doesn't really look that overcooked. Drain pasta when cooked al dente, plate pasta, then spoon veggies and sauce over pasta. Combine remaining pasta and veggies/sauce into one bowl now that it all will fit. Grate fresh Parmesan cheese over each dish. Realize that actually, the squash doesn't taste nearly as overcooked as you feared. Post to LJ with the recipe as a personal reminder after husband proclaims, "This is pretty good, we can do this again sometime."

NOTES:
Butter can probably be reduced to 1 Tbsp without a notable loss of flavor. Cook carrots and asparagus for 5 minutes before adding the squash, or cut all the squash into spears because the circles cook very quickly. Try a half cup of half-and-half next time instead, there was a lot of "saucy juice" left over, but the boy really enjoyed having extra sauce on his, so maybe that's not such a bad thing to add for his sake.

And don't start the vegetables until the water is honest-to-God boiling because that big pasta pot full of water takes like 20 minutes to heat up even at high heat. You'd think you'd have learned that by now, sheesh.

I should've figured, in this day and age, the Phoenix would be Twittering! *follows*

neatorama today posted some notable graduation speakers and included a few snippets from Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford in 2005. The bit that caught my eye:

“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

( Musing about my own job. )

More on the lamb adventures. I'd never made a curry before, and lamb curry seems to be a popular preparation, so I gave it a shot. I haven't taken any pictures, but it looks sorta like a lamb stew. ;) I made it on Friday, so I'm going to write down what I remember before I forget about it completely.

~3 lb lamb leg meat, cut into small chunks (think General Tso's sized chunks)
1 Tbs curry powder, maybe two
4-6 cloves garlic, pressed
1.5 onions, finely diced
salt to taste
1/4 cp olive oil
8-10 small red potatoes, quartered
1 small can tomato paste
1 14oz can chicken broth
sriracha to taste

Heat the oil in a pretty large pan on medium-high. Add the curry powder, sauté for about a minute. Add the onions and garlic, and sauté until the onions are translucent. Add lamb and brown on the outside. Add a healthy dash of salt, tomato paste and chicken broth, and a drizzle of sriracha, depending on how hot you want it. I probably added around a teaspoon or two and there was enough heat that you could taste it but not so much I finished the meal sweating. Cook/simmer on low for about an hour, add the potatoes, and simmer for another half hour, stirring occasionally and adding more liquid if the sauce is thickening up too quickly.

Since we'd just had fried rice the night prior, I served it over couscous instead and it was quite tasty.

Fun fact. A large Dutch oven on the big electric burner set to around 4, 4.5 gets oil hot enough that it melts plastic mixing spoons. And plastic spatulas. The dutch oven has since recovered, but I did have to start completely over with new utensils.

From neatorama:



There are certain chord progressions that just work well. In the same way that there really are no new jokes in the world, there's really very little truly new music that has never shown up in some way before. This may not be the first time I've seen an ensemble do some juxtapositions like this, but it's definitely one of the better times. I'm impressed that the entire ensemble can hold their own parts vocally. That sounds pretty delightfully complex. :)

Remaining lamb in the freezer:

1 shoulder
2 ribs
3 legs
lots of chops

Now I need recipes, hm....

New Year's Eve found me and the husband at home, and me spending most of the day cooking. His aunt raises lambs for the state fair, and this year we purchased one and had them send the butchered cuts to us. 75 pounds of lamb has led to a number of Google searches for lamb recipes! I'd tried Osso Buco with one of our packs of shanks, and it turned out so tasty I had to use our new Dutch oven (thanks, Grandma!) to replicate it for New Year's. Like last time, too, I forgot to bring out the gremolada, despite having the parsley and the lemon in the fridge. Oops.

In the pot before being served:


( More pics: Plated shanks and pie! )

New Year's Day found me too lazy to pull back out the camera, but we enjoyed dessert for breakfast: crepes with macerated strawberries, fresh blueberries and blackberries, diced bananas, the rest of the walnuts that didn't go in the pastry last night, homemade chocolate sauce (melted Ghiradelli bittersweet chips, caster sugar, vanilla and cream/milk), and fresh whipped cream with vanilla. Diabetic comas all around. :)

(cross-posted to food_porn)

Surprised there hasn't been more buzz about this.

Al Gore wins 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for "efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Linked to me by jpaulson.

Very impressive trash-art:
http://oomsa.com/node/456

I thought it might just be a photoshop job, but I'm convinced it's real. And real incredible. This video gives closeups of one of the sculptures.