cooking with intention photos

We had enough of the black-eyed peas and Swiss chard left over last week that I was able to take a photo of it. Don't be afraid, the photo was taken the night after I made the meal. It's hard to tell with the contrast of the chard but those black-eyed peas really are pink. It was a very girly looking dish that tasted really good. This photo is of the only left-overs and they were gone by lunch the following day.





And I used the cream I bought during my frustrating shopping trip yesterday, but not in the way I originally planned. For various reasons we decided we needed mushrooms last night. I don't know if the rest of you feel this way about mushrooms but Marius and I periodically have cravings for them. Normally I just dump them in a pan with some olive oil but since I signed on for the cook-along, it seemed like doing something else with them was required.




I had a huge bag of dried shiitake [sic] mushrooms I had bought a while ago at an Asian supermarket in the City of Industry so I reconstituted them and used that water to cook some really nice fettuccine I got at Whole Foods.







All of this super nice pasta you hear me mention is all the fault of reading Heat. Buford starts repeating Mario Batali's thing about how sauce should be a condiment to your pasta if you have really good pasta. Me, I've always drowned the pasta in sauce so I wanted to give the sauce as condiment approach a try. But I figured, a little sauce wasn't going to be good on crappy pasta. Not that I know good pasta but the book gives some descriptors (surface like sandpaper or a cat's tongue) and I found something at the store that matched.


Very scientific of me, I know.


I made the cream and butter sauce from Hazan's book which is just a cup of heavy whipping cream heated with 2 tablespoons of "good" butter until it thickens. You turn off the heat and cook the pasta and at this point I threw the largely softened mushrooms into the sauce hoping they would absorb some of it. That worked so well that I had considerably less sauce than before so I topped it off a bit and heated it again (fortunately the dried mushrooms could take it) and then added the cooked pasta. You toss it until coated and then add 2/3 a cup of Parmesan cheese (or more if you're me) and pinches of salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste and toss again.





And a close up:



I know some of you are sitting there wondering if I've lost my mind using shi(i)take mushrooms in an alfredo sauce. If it makes you happier, call it fusion cooking or some such nonsense. All I know is it tasted great and it definitely satisfied our mushroom craving. A tasty heart attack on a plate that is ready in about ten minutes. It turns out that super nice pasta (or at least super nice fettuccine) cooks in about four minutes. Next time I'll use chicken and put lemon zest in as all of the cooks seem to be doing these days.