Sunday 9 February 2014

Culinary Adventures

I love to cook.

However, I have very little experience actually cooking.  I have watched a lot of people who know how to cook and I have learned what I can from those people.

In coming to Ireland I decided to just go for it and cook whenever possible.  I thought I would share a few of my successes and failures with you.

Day 1: we made pasta with tomato sauce. 

The pasta is easy.  Or so I thought…  There were two important things that I forgot. 1: you have to stir noodles or they clump together. 2: pasta doubles in size when cooked.  To be honest it could have gone worse, the first day of noodles were great.  It was the leftovers that were pretty much one solid mass.  Cooking noodles really is pretty easy, you just can’t totally forget about them, as I did.

The sauce is the fun part, so here is what you do.  You start with oil (I used olive oil but vegetable oil works too) on low heat(3 out of 10 was the setting that worked for me) and chopped up garlic (I use about half a bulb but I love garlic so you can change that by your preference).  After say five-ish minutes, you add chopped onion, I used a little over half of a baseball sized onion.  You let that simmer (stirring it occasionally) and as you are doing that you cut up 3 tomatoes.  The tomatoes should be cut up fairly well, no bigger than a piece you would put on a salad.  After adding the tomatoes, you can pump the heat up (not too hot, medium hot-ish is good I went 7 out of 10.) You stir that a lot as it cooks.  Then I added a little sauce from a jar (just for color… I think.)

If there is a message to be gained from this story it is this: don’t get so caught up in the new exciting things that you forget the fundamentals that you rely on.


As usual, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

No comments:

Post a Comment