COOKERY: Another experiment last night. The main point of the exercise was to learn to broil a yellow pepper. It was very easy. I get too intimidated by these minor cooking tasks…. Anyway, I started out intending to make soup, but halfway through decided I wanted it as a pasta sauce instead, so next time I do this I’m using less milk and cream. Still, it was very tasty, and I’ll be eating the leftovers for lunch in a minute. Here’s the deal (all quantities are “add as much as you want”; every aspect of this recipe can be meddled with):

I used: one yellow bell pepper; one tomato; maybe 2/3 of a jalapeno (should’ve been more–the pasta and dairy really cut the heat, so I wished I’d used at least the whole jalapeno); chopped onion; little baby carrots from a package (hey, it came free with the Cosi sandwich I’d had for lunch that day); minced garlic; heavy cream; milk; shredded cheese (I used my favorite, Sargento’s “Mexican blend”); spaghetti; butter. Next time I’ll think about herbs and spices–the recipe I was roughly working from didn’t call for any, and I’m not entirely sure what I’d like to add to kick it up a bit. Maybe rosemary and thyme, with a bay leaf? I do think roasted garlic cloves would have been more fun than the minced garlic, though. And I’d be interested in experimenting with other kinds of peppers in this dish–serranos, maybe–and perhaps oyster mushrooms….

What I did: Covered a tray with aluminum foil. Put the pepper on it. Moved the oven rack up as high as it would go and put the tray on it; turned oven to “broil.” Waited… let’s say five minutes. Turned the pepper with tongs. (Parts of its skin had blackened at this point.) Put it back in the oven for a few more minutes (and could probably have kept it in a bit longer, but I was feeling antsy, never having broiled anything before). Took the pepper out, let it cool a bit, and used fingers to peel away the blackened skin (this was quite easy), revealing the tender roasted pepperflesh beneath. Mmmmm. Sniffed the pepper appreciatively.

Chopped up the onion, jalapeno, baby carrots, and roasted pepper. Put ’em in a saute pan with the garlic, milk, and cream, and cooked ’em for a bit. Decided I wanted pasta; turned the heat way down under the saute pan and began to boil water. (You can see how this could have been timed more efficiently.) Cook cook cook cook, stir stir stir stir, add pasta to boiling water, blah de blah. At the last minute, got the mess in the saute pan nice and bubbling hot again, and added the tomato. Drained pasta, buttered pasta, topped with cheese, poured ex-soup over pasta. The spaghetti and cheese soaked up a lot of the soppiness of the sauce, but it was still soupier than it should have been. Tasted delicious though.

Next trick: broiling a portobello cap stuffed with garlic cloves. Mmmm.