So my next Jamie Oliver recipe, I wanted a seafood dish. I narrowed it down to 2 dishes, one was a tomato-y pasta with canned tuna and the second was a spaghetti with mussels dish. Both Steph and Mo voted for the mussels dish, so mussels it is.

Why are mussels so cheap? They’re usually $2-$3 per pound and I bought 2.5lbs of it. Though I should’ve bought the extra half pound because there were few dead ones in the pile.

This whole dish took about 25mins to prep and to cook. While it was fairly easy and straightforward to cook I wasn’t too sure of the end product. It’s hard to know if I cooked it right or not if I haven’t tasted it before. I guess it only matters if the dish was good or not. Well I thought the dish was just alright, it was kind of bland and I was heavy handed with the pepper, whoops. I just didn’t taste any basil or any flavors from the basil oil broth. Overall this was okay.

Click here for the recipe

I used to live on the corner of E 3rd St and Avenue A, and I loved the neighborhood. This was before this blog existed, but I still was excited about the many food options available to me: Nicky’s Vietnamese Sandwiches, Mama’s, and a 24-hour Key Food, among others. I was not, however, aware of the existence of Perbacco, an Italian restaurant that blends tradition and the avant-garde. Lucky for me my friends Jess & Garrett knew about it, and the three of us met there for dinner last week. Lucky for you also, because their photos came out much better than mine (click the link to their blog if you don’t believe me).

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Yes Jamie At Home is the name of Jamie Oliver’s cookbook and also one of this cooking show. But this is me cooking a Jamie Oliver recipe at my own home. I know this idea of cooking through a cookbook and blogging about isn’t new but in my attempt to cook more and actually use the cookbooks I need to document it. Sorta like homework. I’m less lazy if its homework. Also I’m not cooking through 1 book, I’m merely just cooking any of his recipes from books, magazines and website.

So here is my first attempt of this Jamie at Home weekly post (lets see how long this goes eh?) Pasta Peperonata, found here on his website. Oh man this one was so simple to make but I really hate cleaning and slicing bell peppers. In the recipe, creme fraiche or mascarpone cheese is optional but if you ask me it should be a must. I just love a good creamy pasta sauce. Basically you just slice everything, saute everything, stir in the creme fraiche and add pasta and parsley, done! This was really good! The bell peppers were sweet and tasty though my apartment smelled like peppers for few days.

Like Howard said on his post about Al Di La, the entire dinner could be summed up as “good, not great.” I had high hopes for this place and that was probably what killed it. It was hard to not have high hopes when most of the reviews were positive.
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Caramelized fennel. Onions and garlic. Fresh lemon juice. Parmesan cheese. Sounds like a great dish, right? And yet the delicious looking pasta above was actually quite tasteless. So what went wrong?

When I’m cooking, the result is usually pretty good. Occasionally it’s really good, and sometimes it’s no good at all. Maybe in this case I didn’t season the pasta water enough. Maybe I had a bad lemon. It’s hard to say. But I know now not to combine these particular ingredients in this particular fashion again. Often the failures are more important than the successes. It’s a tough lesson to learn, but you can’t let the failure of a dish get you down.

So what are some of your biggest kitchen failures, and what lessons did you learn from them?

I was walking around the West Village the other day when I found myself in front of Murray’s Cheese. Strange as it may sound, I had never been to Murray’s, though I had heard a lot of great things about it.

To my delight, Murray’s sells much more than cheese (although they have plenty of great cheeses). I treated myself to a container of Siggi’s Skyr, which is an Icelandic yogurt-like product. I got the plain version, which was like the creamiest, richest yogurt you’ve ever eaten, with zero fat. I also got some great pasta — nice fresh potato gnocchi, and some dried orrichiette.

Here’s what I did with the orrichiette — I added the boiled pasta to some cabbage and shitakes in olive oil and butter, with salt, pepper and a hot chile (don’t forget to add some of the pasta cooking water towards the end). The result was rich, buttery and wonderful and the orrichiette was nice and chewy.

Oh, I also picked a brick of parmesan cheese while I was at Murray’s. It is a cheese shop, after all. I didn’t use it on this pasta, however. The flavors were spot on already.

Murray’s Cheese — 254 Bleecker St.