Filed under Pasta + Noodles + Rice · Print This Post
I started my Saturday famished. The last of my wisdom teeth was extracted and the only thing I could eat was soup for my last two meals. The Vicodin didn’t quite affect me the way I wanted it to so I was left to fend for myself when I woke up. There were only a couple of eggplants in the fridge and one large tomato, but there were plenty of fresh herbs on the counter. When I have to create a quick meal without using too many ingredients, I usually turn to pasta–there’s always a box of some kind of pasta in the cupboard. I had some leftover pesto in a jar so I decided to add a dollop of that, too, to add some basil-y taste to the dish. I recreated one of my favorite sandwiches, pressed pesto and Gruyere-Parmesan, to match.
Ingredients:
2 cups of penne
2 eggplants, cut lengthwise then halved
1 tomato, quartered then halved
1 sprig of rosemary, roughly chopped
1 sprig of sage, roughly chopped
1 tbsp of pesto
1/4 cup of red wine vinegar
1 dried Thai chile, crushed
lemon juice
oil, salt, pepper
1. In a large mixing bowl, toss eggplants and tomatoes with vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. Transfer vegetables onto a baking sheet, flesh side up. Roast in the oven for about 15 minutes or until tomatoes are soft and a little burnt on the outside. Remove from oven and set aside to cool a little bit.
2. Meanwhile, cook penne al dente. Drain and transfer to a serving bowl.
3. When ready to serve, add the vegetables with the pasta. Toss with rosemary, sage and pesto. Squirt some lemon juice and sprinkle with chile to taste.
Related post/s:
Served with Pressed Pesto and Gruyere-Parmesan Sandwich
Make your own pesto
Filed under Pasta + Noodles + Rice, Vegetables + Salads · Print This Post
Southern cuisine’s “dirty rice” gets its name from the offal pieces they add in their rice. Comfort food often contains more than its fair share of fried stuff as well as heavy starches and some people say “dirty” is also taken from that. I honestly fucked this dish up so I had to literally scramble and rename it “dirty”. I stir-fried the Brussels sprouts and carrots with the salted black beans and then browned the tofu. When it was time to turn the tofu over, they just fell apart. Fuck it, I thought, and I just mixed everything together.
Mark Bittman recently featured canned black beans and I immediately recognized them as the 89-cent cans I see in Chinatown. Filipinos call them tao-si because the black beans come from long string beans we call sitaw. Reverse that and you get taw-si. The spelling changed to make it sound more Chinese. Oh, those Filipinos! I knew they were salty–the beans, not the Filipinos–but not that salty, so I added rice to the dish to fix it up. Sometimes, the most wonderful dishes come out of mistakes made in the kitchen.
Ingredients:
2 small buckets of Brussels sprouts, hard tips sliced off, quartered
a handful of baby carrots, julienned
1 package of extra firm tofu, sliced into strips
1 can of salted black beans, drained
2 cups of steamed white rice
juice from 1 lemon
1 onion, finely chopped
oil
1. In a large skillet, heat some oil. Sauté onions until translucent. Add black beans and cook for 1 minute. Add Brussels sprouts and carrots and stir-fry until carrots are tender. Set vegetables to the side and make room to fry the tofu.
2. Add some more oil if necessary. Brown the tofu on one side. When turning tofu over to cook the other side, they may stick. That’s okay. You can mix them up with the vegetables and make a scramble. Add rice and continue to mix until fully combined. Add lemon juice to control the saltiness of the black beans.
Related post/s:
Part of my Mother Hen project: omakase bento #4
Stuff tomatoes with rice this summer
