Pasta + Noodles + Rice – Page 5 – Writing With My Mouth Full

Sardines with Linguini

I’ve been drowning in pork and beef for the last two weeks so I thought a dose of fish would do me good. Rummaging through the pantry, I found two tins of sardines and some pasta from my last visit to Trader Joe’s. Following a Sicilian recipe I found online, I threw some leftover rye bread in the food processor to make my own bread crumbs. I didn’t have capers handy but I can imagine it would have been the kick the dish needed–I settled for red pepper flakes instead. A splash of lemon juice before serving gave this pasta dish the fresh touch it deserved.

Ingredients:
linguini
2 tins sardines, drained
1 cup bread crumbs
a handful of parsley, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 small red onion, thinly sliced
red pepper flakes
oil, salt, pepper

1. Cook linguini in boiling water al dente. Drain and set aside.
2. While cooking the pasta, heat some oil in a skillet. Sauté garlic until golden brown and onions until translucent. Add bread crumbs and stir until toasted. Add parsley and season with salt and pepper. Remove to a plate.
3. Using the same skillet, heat a little bit more oil and cook sardines by sautéing and crushing them in smaller chunks. Season with red pepper flakes.
4. Transfer drained pasta to the skillet and toss with the sardines. Add back the cooked bread crumbs and keep tossing until combined.

Pancit Canton, Filipino Noodles with Stir-Fried Vegetables

I skipped swimming tonight to run some errands I’ve been putting off the last week so all I wanted for dinner was something healthy and quick to make. I wanted a lot of half-cooked vegetables and imagined a lot of crunch to my meal. I immediately thought of cabbage and bubble and squeak, but I didn’t really feel like eating potatoes. I turned to the Filipino pancit after I remembered that I still have a package of cooked noodles from the Khmer Legacies swag a couple of weeks ago.

Canton noodles, one of the many Chinese influences Filipinos call their own, are long egg noodles that have been precooked and dried before packaging and thus only require a few minutes to cook. Time the prep just right and you’ll be slicing and dicing while the first batch of vegetables are cooking. This way, your time is spent efficiently and you avoid overcooking any of the ingredients. The worst is to eat soggy noodles. You can use angel hair noodles as a substitute here; just cook them al dente and toss with the vegetables before serving.

Ingredients:
1 pack of pancit Canton noodles
2 cups of chicken broth
1 small head of cabbage, sliced into strips
1 cup of dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in water then drained, roughly chopped
a handful of string beans, roughly chopped
1 small carrot, roughly chopped
2 red bell peppers, julienned
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves of garlic, minced
peanut oil
sesame oil
soy sauce
juice from 1 lime
salt

1. Heat some peanut oil in a large skillet. Sauté garlic until brown and onions until soft. Add cabbage and toss until covered in oil. Let cook for about 5 minutes while occasionally mixing.
2. Add the carrots and cook for another 2 minutes. Then add the softened mushrooms, string beans and the bell peppers. Keep tossing all the ingredients together to cook evenly. Add chicken broth and cover the skillet for 3 minutes to steam the vegetables.
3. Meanwhile, soak the noodles in a bowl of water to soften them. Gently separate noodles by hand. Drain, uncover the skillet and add noodles with the vegetables. Drizzle some sesame oil for flavor and season with salt and a jigger or two of soy sauce to taste. Toss for another 3 minutes to make sure the noodles are evenly distributed. Remove to a plate and serve with lime juice for a little sting.

Ramps Fried Rice

Now that everyone knows what ramps are, I don’t have to go to Vermont to rummage for them or pay $5 for a bunch at Whole Foods. The farmers market have settled on the $2.50 price for each small bundle and more than one tent sells them now. I still find them pricey–the Spotted Pig still gets away with charging $13 for a plate of it–so I’ve gotten used to pickling my own every spring to make them last longer than a week.

After getting my first few bunches to welcome spring this year, I still had a couple to play with. With some pancetta in the fridge, I decided to add some cold rice to make a very onion-y fried rice. I matched it with some mâche tuna salad and lentil soup to make a hearty lunch box the next day.

Ingredients:
2 bunches of ramps, thoroughly washed, roots sliced off
a thin sliver of pancetta, diced
1 egg
1 cup of leftover white rice, crushed with the back of your spoon
salt, pepper

1. Sweat the pancetta in a skillet with some hot oil and continue to cook until a little browned. Toss in ramps, season with salt and pepper, and sauté until wilted.
2. Add rice and fry until warm. Crack the egg into the pot and mix with the rice until scrambled.

Kimchi Fried Rice with Fried Egg

Funny how Korean food is my crutch cuisine after a night out of excessive drinking. If not a hot, spicy soup before going home, it’s kimchi fried rice topped with a fried egg when I wake up. Korean food can lead you to too much drinking, but it sure does help you recover from it.

A fried egg is perfect with this fried rice. When you crack the half-cooked yolk and let the yellow ooze over your rice, you’ll forget about that banging headache, too. Mmm, I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

Ingredients:
leftover cooked white rice
kimchi
1 egg
oil

1. In a heavy skillet, heat some oil and add rice. Fry and cook by stirring and tossing until the cold rice is warm and free of clumps. Add a small amount of kimchi and stir. The rice should be red-orange, but you don’t want it to be too moist. I try not to add too much of the kimchi juice. Remove fried rice to a bowl.
2. Using the same skillet, heat some oil again and fry the egg. Serve on top of the fried rice.

Tomato Paella

Paella seems to be in the news lately. Mark Bittman featured this vegetarian-friendly recipe a few weeks ago and I took note to recreate it for our August Supper with Strangers. Over the long weekend, a grilled version was featured in the Sunday Times Magazine.

I had time to test Bittman’s recipe, but I found it hard to cook the rice in under 30 minutes. I tried his way the first round using the oven but some parts remained undercooked. I felt like there was so much maintenance to make sure the rice was evenly cooked. For my second try, I left it on top of the stove but it still needed so much attention I just had no patience for it.

So for Supper, I committed the worst paella sin there could be and used a rice cooker to make sure the dish went well for six guests. It did: the rice was fluffy, not sticky, and I didn’t have to keep adding vegetable broth. The initial few cups I used kept it cooking with just a simmer. It’s almost blasphemous, I know, but the paella turned out well. I grilled some lamb chorizo to go with the dish and some thinly-sliced aubergines as a vegetarian alternate. I topped both versions with grilled tomato slices and poured over salted tomato pulp to make it moist.

Ingredients:
4 cups of short-grain rice
1 pack of vegetable broth
1 large heirloom tomato, thinly sliced
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tbsps paprika
1 tbsp tomato paste
half a bunch of parsley, finely chopped
oil, salt, pepper

If using:
1 eggplant, thinly sliced, seasoned with salt and pepper, grilled
1 rope of lamb chorizo, grilled, and then sliced

1. Heat a skillet and add some oil. Sauté garlic until golden brown. Add onions and cook until translucent. Season with salt and pepper. Stir in tomato paste and paprika and cook for another minute. Add rice, stirring constantly, making sure everything is well-combined.
2. Transfer everything to a rice cooker and add vegetable broth. Cook like you do white rice.
3. Five minutes from being done, when the rice has settled but there is still some broth simmering, top with tomato slices to cook in the remaining steam.
4. When cooked, turn off the rice cooker, stir the rice and sprinkle with parsley. Let sit in the cooker until ready to serve. Served with grilled chorizo or eggplants.