Tag Team Pasta

Julia and I both love to cook for one another. Sometimes the most fun dinners though are the ones where we cook together. We got a little creative and adventurous as a team recently, and in no more than a laugh-filled half-hour had pounded out one of the more elegant dishes we had cooked in a while.

The adventurous part was making our own pasta from scratch. We always see it on TV – simply mix an egg per person with just enough flour so that it goes into a crumbly dough. It's never the exact recipe – different on Jamie Oliver than on Iron Chef America – but it's always the same concept. It was Julia's idea, so she was in charge of making pasta, while I was in charge of the cutting and cooking of the pasta as well as the sauce to accentuate it, a lemon truffle butter sauce.

Julia mixed 3 eggs with about 3 cups of flour in the food processor until it was a crumbly consistency and then worked the dough on the counter for a couple minutes until it was smooth and ready to be fed into the roller attachment for her stand mixer. She said that it seemed a little too brittle and worked a little more egg in so that it would feed and roll out into smooth sheets. It seems that it would have been easier to add more flour to a too-soft pasta dough than add more egg to a too-brittle dough, so we agreed that under-shooting the flour would be better for next time. Still, before I could even melt my butter with a little olive oil, truffle oil, onion, salt, pepper, lemon zest, lemon juice, goat cheese, paprika, sage and nutmeg and let it thicken into a nice, deep-flavored pan sauce, Julia was handing me lovely smooth sheets of rolled pasta. I was beyond impressed!

I floured each sheet all over as I folded them in half several times. Then I ran my knife through to make long, thickish, spaghetti-like noodles. Nothing too pretty or exact, but the nice rustic, homemade look that we love in our food (and Jamie Oliver promised us it would on his show.) As soon as I had cut and fluffed the pasta into a big mess of lovely looking strands, I put it all into my pot of boiling, salted water. Used to 10-15 minutes of cooking time for dried pasta? This fresh pasta takes just a minute to cook to al dente, maybe even less. It's amazing.

I tossed the finished pasta with the finished sauce and plated just in time for Julia to garnish each portion with a nice grate of fresh parmesan.

The pasta tasted amazing and we both agreed the sauce was subtle but really brought out the right flavors. The acidity of the lemon with just enough salty and rich complements really popped with the perfect al dente of the pasta. It was a comforting and delicious dinner, and one that was way more fun to make and eat together than to just order in some restaurant for $20. We got to learn a little through being adventurous and laugh our way all the way to a perfect dinner for two.

Bruschetta Fresca

Julia and I had some fun last weekend having a little “switch-off” dinner. Basically, I go in the kitchen and make a little, creative plate that we share together, and then she goes and does the same. The dishes were small and tasty so we were able to have a few rounds of it. We had a lot of fun eating, relaxing and laughing about our cooking and just stuff in general. You need a bit of time on your hands to play this dinner game, but it is a worthwhile couples activity.

With my first dish, I decided to utilize some of our best ingredients in a simple way with a play on a bruschetta. I took four long, thin slices of beer bread and spread some nice horseradishy mustard on each side. I heated a little Smart Balance in a pan and then put the slices in to absorb a little bit of the flavor and crisp up a bit. I had shredded some amazing sharp, Irish white cheddar and put a nice heavy pinch of it all over the top of each piece of bread before carefully flipping each one, so the cheese ended up on the bottom. I then sprinkled a little more cheese on top of the “bottoms” and let them crisp a little more. Once the cheese on bottom was crisped enough that it was not sticking to the bottom, I flipped the breads again for just another minute. The breads were golden, orange and crispy on both sides and smelling great.

I put two of the thin slices on each plate and then topped each plate with some salad of arugula, diced Roma tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, sea salt and cracked black pepper, which I had dressed up in a separate bowl on the side. I then shaved off a few more bits of cheddar onto each plate for garnish. All done was my fresh take on bruschetta – less garlic and oil and more greens and mustard flavor.

Julia very much approved of my dish, loving the subtle decadence of the plate without losing its freshness and crispness. I might have said it was the best appetizer served that night if not for the beautiful overeasy egg, kalamata olives and lime yogurt sauce over a toast round that Julia served to me some 20 minutes later. She must have read my 101 favorite foods and known that while balsamic vinegar (#39), extra virgin olive oil (#28), sharp cheddar cheese (#23), arugula (#25) and Roma tomatoes (#51) all appear high on my list – that she could even win me over ME with a perfect egg (#2) and kalamata olives (#11). Although I'm guessing she would have gotten that one right, list or no list.

Tangy Toastadas (or Down with Tupperware)

When Julia (my fiancée) and I were getting ready to move from Michigan to DC, we made an important and intelligent decision about our culinary future together. Down with the tupperware!

Forgive me if this doesn't sound like a familiar rallying cry, but those misshapen, non-matching, funny-smelling lumps of plastic did no wonders for my eating experience. Besides being expensive, hard to wash and annoying to lug to work or school, they contribute to two kinds of waste. They permeated through our cooking behaviors, and I'm sure we were not alone.

The first kind was a sort of active waste: having lots of tupperware makes you think that leftovers are a really great thing, and you never put the effort in to actually cooking the amount of food you need. This contributes to the second form of waste: not eating the leftovers because you have so much. This is particularly bad, because you've already made the extra food and loaded the excess into a container and probably left it in your fridge for a while before finally forcing yourself to eat it so it doesn't go bad, or throwing it away because it has gone bad. You might say that I would waste more because I pitched or gave away my tupperware, but the key is that I'm not replacing the hunks of smelly plastic with disposable, less eco-friendly versions. In fact, the point is to reduce all but the best or most necessary leftovers. Cook (or order for that matter) what you're GOING to eat. It's a simple and marvelous concept. You waste less food, less money, plus have the added bonus of not being forced to eat old leftovers, unless they're really good and you've intended it this way.

Of course, if you're not cooking for a family, but for yourself or for two, making just enough food can be much more difficult. Many recipes serve four at a minimum, cooking TV shows always make a ton of food, and sometimes it just seems difficult to conceptualize cooking for just a couple people or just one. But I think it is more than possible, and that you can actually come up with better dishes this way. Plus, often when you come up with a great small recipe, it's easier to make larger when you DO have more people, rather than vice versa. All this is why I will be focusing on meals I've created or recipes that are size adjustable, or simply those that work really well for just one or two people.

Let's start with a meal that Julia made a couple nights ago. It is something we've had before, it's easy and it's flexible. I look at it as a healthier version of taco night. Tostada night. Well, really “Toastada” night -- because “toast” is the key to making these healthy. Get your own corn tortillas. They are naturally low in sodium and fat, and even have more than 1 gram of fiber each. All you have to do is crisp them (or toast) them in the oven on 400 F with a light spray of cooking spray on each side for 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly brown and crispy. You can add salt to taste, but I find it adds little besides some excess sodium. They taste great with just the spray -- plus a couple drops of Tabasco will add all the flavor you need! From there, you can add any taco ingredients that you would normally want and pile them on top of the “toastadas”. Let's just say they beat the store-bought shells in flavor, texture and health.

A few notes about making the toppings as great as possible. Tang! My I've found how much interesting flavor a spritz of a lime wedge will add to a taco or tostada. It is literally amazing. Make it your last topping you add to each “toastada” and you'll love what it does for all the other toppings.

With that much flavor coming through, black beans, salsa, avocado slices, chopped onion, green onion, tomato, the lime wedges, Tabasco and a little reduced fat sour cream are all we need to enjoy a wonderful and easy dinner for two. No need for cheese; no need for meat either. It really is a terrific little thing to whip up in only a few minutes -- plus you get to decide how much you make. Tupperware or no tupperware, there will NOT be any leftovers because this dish is just too tasty!