Herbalicious Pasta

Mmmmm… You can never go wrong with pasta and a sauce rich with fragrant herbs. That’s why when I found out that we were making a pasta sauce for our Herbs & Spices unit today in my Gourmet Foods/Cultures & Cuisines class, I couldn’t help but get REALLY excited. No one will ever understand how in love I am with anything Italian. I love their culture, their language and if their food were a man, I would marry it. It’s a bummer that my Mom isn’t that big of a fan of Italian food so I don’t get to make it as often as I want. I mean, I make Italian food about 2 to 3 times a week… If I had it my way, I would probably eat Italian food every single day… And maybe I should because Italian food, when made right, is often healthy. Even the oil they use is healthy!

Anyway, this recipe is very simple but it leaves you with some room to experiment and adjust it to suit your taste.

Here it is:
1 Tablespoon olive oil (not extra virgin olive oil — that stuff isn’t always the best for sautéing because it burns pretty fast)
1/4 cup carrots, finely chopped
1/4 cup celery, finely chopped
1/2 cup onions, finely chopped
1/2 Teaspoon minced (or better yet, grated) garlic
1 Tablespoon dried herbs*
2 Teaspoons tomato paste
2 cups canned diced tomatoes
Salt and pepper to taste

*It’s really up to you. This is where you can be creative. We were assigned specific herbs in our kitchens. My kitchen group was assigned basil. However, I made this pasta sauce again tonight for dinner and I mixed up a bunch of different herbs. I mixed some dried basil, dried oregano and parsley flakes. Together, they added up to a tablespoon of dried herbs. However, if you want to use fresh herbs from your own herb garden, double the amount to 2 Tablespoons of herbs. Remember: Dried herbs are sharper than fresh herbs.

1. Heat up a saucepan on your stove (Medium heat)
2. After about a minute, pour the olive oil into the sauce pan.
3. Add the carrots, celery and onion and sauté for about 3 – 5 minutes (until onion becomes translucent)
4. Add the herbs and then the garlic. Toss the ingredients together.
5. Add the tomato paste. Mix well.
6. Add the diced tomatoes and add some salt and pepper.
7. Simmer on med-low heat for about 10 minutes.
8. Serve on top of pasta. I would recommend seashell pasta but it’s really up to you.

Like I mentioned earlier, I made some for dinner tonight and I’m putting some in my lock and lock container and brown bagging some for lunch tomorrow. This recipe is easy, healthy and delicious. It took me about 25 minutes (I cooked the pasta shells simultaneously) to make and that includes prep time. And like I also said earlier, be creative with it! I doubled the garlic that I used because I love the taste of garlic. You can add some ham or diced grilled chicken leftovers from a previous dinner. You can also add more vegetables to give you more of your daily vegetable needs from this dish. I’m planning on trying some olives and mushrooms next time. See, it’s a flexible dish. You can modify it to make it suit your taste and if you serve it on a really nice plate, you can even serve it as a homemade meal for a date

Cheesy Garlic Buttery Crescent Rolls

There are days when I want something that tastes homemade but I’m too lazy to make something from entirely from scratch. For many people, that’s actually an everyday laziness. So here’s a really quick and easy recipe that you can try out when you’re having one of those days…

Buttery crescent rolls are the next best thing since sliced bread! (and I can see my English teacher wincing at my use of something so cliché) But seriously… It’s amazing how the frozen ones that they have at the grocery store taste of homemade goodness after they spend about 12 minutes in the oven.

I bought some over the summer and decided to add some stuff to them…

1 can frozen crescent rolls
1 1/2 cups shredded cheese
1/4 cup – 1/2 cup salt-free garlic and herb seasoning

The Pillsbury crescent rolls are the best but the store-brand ones really are not bad either. As for the shredded cheese, I personally prefer Kraft’s Italian Style Five Cheese because these rolls taste Italian to me. Oh, and I prefer Safeway’s Garlic and Herb Salt-Free Seasoning but you can use whatever’s available. Just make sure it’s salt-free because with all the cheese you’ll be using, you really won’t need extra salt! If you can’t find a garlic and herb seasoning, you can mix some garlic powder (powder — not salt!) or dehydrogenated minced garlic with Italian seasoning. If you don’t have Italian seasoning, you can mix dried thyme, dried sage, dried rosemary, dried oregano, dried basil or whatever dried Italian herbs you have.

Just follow the instructions in the can and you will soon have cheesy, garlicy, buttery and delish rolls!

Oh, and just an extra tip: Don’t just turn off the oven and leave the rolls IN the oven. Take them out and let them cool on a cooling rack. I can’t stress that more. They will get disgustingly hard if you leave them in.

Chocolate Crinkles

I don’t know about you but I LOVE chocolate. To me, chocolate is ambrosial. It is the food of the gods. I am extremely humbled to have access to it.

Anyway, when my aunt and uncle visited us for the Christmas holidays in 2007, my aunt and I began to talk about my interests and I mentioned to her that I loved baking. She said she had been craving for moist chocolate crinkles — like the ones her other niece (not my cousin) made.

It was a rainy, cold day and no one wanted to go anywhere. I felt kind of bad for my aunt and uncle because I wanted something interested to happen to them every single day they were with us. I wanted to them to go some place or eat something interesting every day! So, I went online to look for a good chocolate crinkles recipe. I found Chocolate Crinkles II from Allrecipes.com and because the ratings for this recipe were pretty high, I thought I would give it a try! (Oops, I didn’t mean to rhyme!)

They turned out to be amazing! And they were easy to make. They were chocolatey, sweet but not too sweet and my aunt liked them so much I made them 3 more times before they finally said good bye.

Last night, while watching Jeopardy, I began to crave for something chocolatey like crazy! I wanted something baked… something warm and sweet that I could drink with a glass of milk. As I walked to the fridge, the printed page of the Chocolate Crinkles recipe caught my eye and I knew I had to make some.

As I had mentioned earlier, it is an extremely easy recipe. You most probably have all the ingredients at hand and if you don’t, you should go to the store and buy them right away! All the ingredients for this recipe are pretty cheap, too.

So, you begin by mixing together the wet ingredients. The mixture will be good enough to eat and you will be tempted but try your best to NOT even taste batter. Oh, and by the way, using a cool leaf-like bowl (which is actually a punch bowl and not a mixing bowl) is optional.

In a separate bowl, you will mix the dry ingredients. Remember to be careful when measuring stuff out. Baking is all about chemistry and proportions. When measuring stuff out, take a heaping spoonful/cupful of the dry ingredient and level it out with an icing spatula or even just a knife. Oh, and remember not to pack/press down flour! I don’t know why you shouldn’t do that but my Foods and Nutrition teacher told me not to and I haven’t done that since… and, I am proud to inform you, I haven’t baked anything that didn’t turn out well since.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and fold them in with a spatula. You don’t need an electric mixer for this. If I were you, I would gradually add the dry ingredients because that’s going to make your life easier.

Then — here’s the hard part — you have to chill the mixture in the fridge. Otherwise, the dough is impossible to work with and will just stick to your hands. However, I’ve never followed the recipe’s 4 torturously long hours recommended chilling time. I spread out the mixture on a couple of plates and I stick them in the freezer for 45 minutes and voila! The dough becomes possible to work with!

So you take heaping teaspoons of the dough and roll them out into balls before coating them with powedered sugar. Oh, and you can be creative with the coating. I’ve mixed powdered sugar with cinammon and those turned out to be delicious! Chocolates go very well with cinammon Then, you just have to stick them in the oven for about 11 minutes and after about 5 minutes of cooling (Oh, a minute is always good enough for me!), you can enjoy them. They should look like the cookies in the picture at the top of this post. They will be heavenly and you will understand why I think chocolate is the food of the gods.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this recipe. My mom (who highly disapproves of me baking because she thinks the goods I make are always just too unhealthy) actually requested for me to make her some of these. Now that means something.