Full disclosure, I am not actually a pasta eater. I like it enough, and if it has something good in it (seafood, mushrooms, etc) I might pick it off the menu at a restaurant, but it is hardly ever my first choice. I'm not sure what it is, I think it has something to do with how heavy it feels in my stomach and gives me the really full, really fast feeling. I am not a fan of that feeling. My wife however, is part Italian, which means that she could live off of pasta if need be. Once in a while, if I'm feeling selfless, or have run out of ideas for dinner, there is one particular pasta dish that I will make -- Mushrooms, asparagus, garlic and lots of Parmesan cheese. That is why I decided to go for this particular Jamie Oliver recipe first. It reminded me a bit of that, minus the asparagus. And not as heavy on the Parmesan cheese.
Although I'm not a pasta fan per-se, I have one very strong memory of myself as a child sneaking into my mom's bowl of discarded and broken lasagna noodles and eating as many as I could. Something about the fact that they're always 10 times the size of a normal noodle made them just seem so delicious to me. Pappardelle remind me of just that, a discarded slice of a lasagna noodle. I didn't know that they made pasta that wide, but I think I am a little bit in love. One thing I do have to admit to though is that even though the directions specifically called for "flash frying" the mushrooms, I may have cooked them a little longer then that. OK, I definitely cooked them longer then that. I'm kind of particular about my mushrooms, the texture of them when raw weirds me out a bit, so I tend to over cook them in order to avoid that. Because of this, I ended up with some wilted, sad looking & un-photogenic, although very tasty mushrooms.
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| Pappardelle with Mixed wild Mushrooms |
The tomato salad was basically a milder version of a caprice salad my wife makes sometimes. Jamie's version used a lot less of everything. A sprinkle of chopped up garlic, a scattering of finely chopped up red onion, a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil & balsamic vinegar. In our home, we are flavor junkies. We pile on the herbs and spices, garlic usually being at the top of that list. Jamie's tomato salad made me realize that there is no need to be so heavy handed… It was definitely a much lighter taste then we are used to, but we gobbled up every single one of those tomatoes.
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| Tomato Salad |
That weekend also happened to be our dog, Mamachita's 9 th birthday. So like every year, I made a dog friendly birthday cake of Jiffy's blueberry muffin mix & dog food, with a cream cheese "frosting." I figured since this was a food blog, I would share it with you as well!
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| Blueberry Doggie Cake |
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| Happy Birthday Mamachita!! |
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