A Strolling Start

With the motivation mentioned in my previous post, I embarked on my culinary endeavour. The first thing I wanted to do better was, of course, pasta, since it was the ground-zero dish that ignited the whole thing. And, what better to begin with than something I already had some rudimentary skills in!

I already knew to cook pasta to al dente. Taste, not just for pasta but everything, naturally was the target. All the salt and pepper and olive oil didn't make tasty pasta, just a salty bland pasta. My poor hubby tolerated it for so long.

Fortunately, my younger sister gave me a big stack of cookbooks amongst her wedding gifts to me. Now I was finally using them. My first attempts were simply following the one-pot recipes. It was easy to do and great to eat. Cook the pasta, drain, stir in cheese and chopped meat, plus microwaved frozen vegetables, and may be chopped nuts, adjust seasoning and serve. Viola! For cheese, I used not just cheddar but sometimes feta, camembert or even creamy blue. Meat was mostly ham or other cold cuts and sometimes cut up sausages that was baked in the oven, or shredded meat of a ready-to-serve roast chicken from the supermarket. Convenient, though not really elegant.

So, it was a nice, easy success. No pasta sauce to make (or ruin). Adding double cream was the saucey (and saucy!) shortcut. But, it soon became boring.

Making pasta sauce from scratch is not a difficult thing, if you already know how to do it right. It actually is a vast subject, as you may already know. A rich tomatoey meat sauce is but one out of hundreds of sauces. There are books written entirely on sauces alone by culinary greats (and not exactly greats, but definitely many). So, what should I take as my next challenge? Hmm....

Of course, macaroni cheese! A pasta al forno, just to make it sound all fancy. Then, I discovered how opposite to simple it was. There a quite a few things to trip you up, starting with the béchamel sauce, or basic white sauce, to getting the dish to a golden brown without turning the cheese into curds inside. It was an obstacle course. But more about this battle and triumph next time.