One of the things that I regularly keep in my kitchen is a tin of anchovies, most of the time bought at Trader Joe’s. I thought it has been toooo tooooooo long since last I made anything from a Jamie Oliver cookbook and it was time. Also few months ago my friends S & S finally gave me my Xmas present and HELLO it was the Jamie’s Food Revolution cookbook. This cookbook is geared towards people that can’t really cook so to me means simple recipes! I was flipping through the book and came upon this recipe for Pasta Al Pangrattato. All you need are bread crumbs, anchovies, thyme, dried chili and pasta. Luckily I had everything except thyme. Once I got the thyme I prepped everything and made the dish. FYI, the anchovies that Trader Joe sells do not melt in the pan. I have tried it many times and every time they don’t melt like they should. I have bought anchovies from higher end grocery stores and they do melt.

I wasn’t a big fan of this dish because it was too dry. I like my pasta with a bit of sauce but this was hella easy to make and good way to use up old bread.

Click for the recipe

If you have a lot of heavy cream and need to use it up, what will you do? I have already used some of the cream to make whipped cream for ice cream and I was in the mood for some pasta. But I can only use so much cream in a pasta dish. Then I came up with this idea. Just like cooking chicken or pork in milk what if I cooked the vegetables in heavy cream and let it cooked till most of the cream evaporated away. I really wanted to make a broccoli pasta dish but I was kind of lazy to have to deal with chopping the broccoli and having little bits of broccoli flying everywhere. So….what about carrots? I never had carrots in my pasta before and I thought I was being a GENIUS until I googled carrots in pasta and found a bunch. Anyways here’s what I made.

Click to continue

This week of cooking a Jamie Oliver recipe is his Wild Rocket & Chilli Spaghetti recipe. This recipe was super duper easy and quick and tasted good too. Arugula is the same as rocket right? I used wild arugula and chilli flakes instead of dried chillies. Give this recipe a try and I’m sure you can use whatever greens you can find instead of wild rocket/arugula.

What the hell is mush you ask? Believe my friend Phaedra came up with it and gave it its name. Few years ago I had my first mush and it was DELICIOUS! It’s quite simple actually combine chili with mac n’cheese and you get mush!

Recently I found myself at Trader Joe’s again, trying to make something quick, simple and cheap, I used a recipe from my sister, Connie, for a cheap quick Trader Joe’s chili. Get a pack of ground beef around $2.25, a can of black beans and a can of tomato soup. Well I left the list of ingredients at work so I had to go with my memory. I thought she told me a can of diced tomato SO I got a can of diced tomato instead of a can of soup. Anyways, I also grabbed a bag of pasta. I went home and cooked the pasta just couple minutes short of al dente time, dumped the cans of black beans and diced tomatoes and mixed. In another pan while the pasta was cooking I cooked the ground meat. When the pasta mixture is nearly done I added the meat and a whole lotta parmesan cheese. Served it with bread!

Springtime brings some interesting things to the market; things like fiddlehead ferns. I’ve cooked with fiddleheads before, but I wanted something quick, easy and light. I ended up blanching the fiddleheads in salted boiling water (a necessary step to properly clean them), and then sauteing them with sliced asparagus in olive oil with salt and pepper until they were just tender. I added some fresh lemon juice, and then when that cooked down I poured in the liquid from a can of tomatoes. I cooked this down for just a few minutes, re-seasoned, and then tossed with some gemelli pasta. It was a great expression of early spring, and it was delicious.

Well all about the Japanese curry to be more precise. There’s always a box of House Curry Mild in my kitchen because it’s damn easy to cook this. Cook some veggies or some meat or some both or not, then add water and the curry. Cook until the curry has all been dissolved and veggies/meats are done. One box of curry has about 12 servings and I usually use the whole box. I just love curry! One of my food mission when I was still living in LA was to go to all of the Curry Houses but I only made it to 4 Anyways, I usually invite people over when I make a big pot of curry but even then I end up with a large container of leftover curry that would last me for another 4 meals. Yes I said I love curry but even I get bored of eating curry over rice for more than 2-3 times. So what I usually do is freeze the rest of the curry or change it up a bit.

One night I found myself craving for curry and of course I made a giant pot. But instead of freezing the rest I came up with the idea of creating other dishes with the same curry sauce.

Click to see what I came up with