Don’t cry for me, intarwebz!
One of my absolute worst habits is the wasting of food. It’s obscene, the amount of food that rots in my fridge while I eat microwave popcorn.
I think part of it is that I have good intentions. One of the things that I wind up throwing away the most of is bagged salads. I buy a bag, eat one salad out of it, then don’t want salad again for two weeks.
Another bad influence on my waste is the farmer’s market. Saturday is the only day to really hit the farmer’s market, there’s not nearly as many vendors there on tuesdays and thursdays. So, I see all of these great veggies that look amazing and I buy more than I can eat that day. Then I forget about my purchases until the next weekend, when they are way yuck.
Tonight, though, I rescued a whole bunch of things that might have been forgotten if not for the fact that I skipped lunch and spent my last hour of work thinking about what I wanted for dinner. Sparks says, “Spaghetti? You can’t do better than that after the great dinner you made last night?”
Don’t mourn for poor Ysha, babies and darlings. This was no sauce from a jar with greyish hamburger.
I started with a package of cherry tomatoes (they were on sale at Kroger last week for a dollar!) and half a bulb of garlic. I cleaned the tomatoes and separated the garlic cloves, tossing them all with olive oil and kosher salt and tossed them in the oven for 30 minutes at 400F. The garlic was soft and yummy, but the tomatoes weren’t done yet, so I put them back for about another 20 minutes while I got started on the rest of my sauce.
I cleaned a quarter pound of chanterelle mushrooms (farmer’s market last saturday) and sauteed them in a tablespoon of butter. Oh yes, Paula Dean fans, we cook with butter around here! I tossed in a little salt and then hit them with a half cup or so of leftover shiraz that I was keeping around to cook with. I mashed the garlic out of the skins and turned it into a paste, which was tossed in with the mushrooms. I also dumped in the tomatoes at the point and squished them with the spatula. I decided the sauce looked a bit dry, so I dumped in a bit of chicken stock (for that simmered all day taste, says Rachel Ray. whatevs, says I.) I boiled up a big handful of angel hair pasta while this was going on and chopped up a big handful of basil leaves (farmer’s market last saturday). I mixed probably 2/3 of the basil in with the sauce to simmer.
When the pasta was done I drained it and tossed it with a tablespoon of butter. Then topped it with the sauce, a handful of parmesan cheese and the rest of the basil.
And hey look! A picture! GET OUT!
I took 8 pictures of a bowl of pasta, just to get one that wasn’t horrid.
Just for reference, that bowl would feed two adults, probably 3 if you threw in a salad and bit of bread. I ate almost half of it before I was stuffed to the gills.