KITCHEN ADVENTURES: FAST AND FEAST! Two successful experiments.

First, the last meal I had during Lent: pasta with faked-up peanut sauce. I cooked spaghetti. While it was cooking I heated some olive oil in a pot. Chopped garlic and ginger and sliced onion went into the pot and got golden with browned bits. Then I added maybe two tbsps? of creamy peanut butter, some milk, and some bottled ginger-sesame sauce, and hit everything with the immersion blender. Added cumin, a bit of cinnamon, cayenne, and dried rosemary, and fresh basil, then buttered the pasta and topped it with the sauce.

This was really delicious, although I had the pasta-to-sauce ratio off (I’d intended to make this a very small bowl of food) so I had a bunch of leftover spaghetti. But I had been simultaneously intrigued by and fearful of this idea, and I was very pleased with how it turned out. I’ll definitely make this again.

Second, the salad I had for dinner tonight: a random salad. The base of the salad was some thinly-sliced yellow onion, a little more than half of a round red farmer’s-market apple (I don’t remember the exact breed of apple, but it was described at the market as “good for lunchboxes”), two chopped cevapi sausages (pork and beef) leftover from dinner at Slaviya with Camassia, some shredded French sorrel, some shredded fresh basil, chunks and crumbles of chopped parmesan, and a toasted sourdough roll torn into roughly croutonish things. Then I whisked “Moroccan mustard” and olive oil with a fork until it emulsified and poured that as a dressing over the salad.

This was absolutely at its best when I got some of all of the ingredients in one forkful. The sausage and apple balanced one another perfectly. This is a tangy salad (apple + mustard + sorrel) so the parmesan and toasted bread really help create balance as well. I know the ingredients do sound a bit kitchen-sinky but I loved this.