hooker noodles!

Because if you've only got 20 minutes to make dinner, you are obviously some kind of prostitute.

If you've seen as many gangster movies as I have you know that "putta" is some kind of insult. Well, that's because it had the same root as puttana, which means bitch, or whore, in Italian. And Pasta Puttanesca, so named as "in the style of the whore" was rumoured to be called such because it could easily be made in the few minutes a woman had between clients. Yeah, well, I've only got a few minutes between work, school, and homework. (I promise I will not go into feminist rants about dichotomous representations of women as either the madonna, who apparently had hours to cook 4 course meals every night, and the whore, who obviously needed something a little faster for dinner).

Pasta Puttanesca

What You Need:

• pasta, of whatever shape you prefer
• 1/4 c of muffaletta olive salad (stored in a pickled mixed veggies jar)

(OR

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• handfull of green olives
• garlic
• onion
• marinated artichoke hearts)

And

• 1-2 c cocktail tomatoes (or 1-2 normal size roma tomatoes)
• 1/2 c crushed tomatoes (or just more fresh chopped tomatoes)
• 1 c broth or wine
• 1/2 tsp Worchestershire sauce (or fish sauce, or a couple anchovies)
• 1 tsp capers
• handful of kalamata olives
• sundried tomatoes
• 1/4 c fresh basil leaves, chiffonaded

What You Gotta Do:

Okay, I totally did this in 20 minutes. Even set the timer to prove it. (bloody impossible to see, but it says 19 minutes, honest)

Get your water on for the pasta. If you cover the pot, it will boil faster.

In the large shallow pan, (makes for faster sauces because more surface area to cook on and to lose moisture from) over medium high heat, put your olive salad,

or if you don't have olive salad in the fridge (um, why don't you have olive salad in the fridge??) you're going to have to spend a few minutes chopping the olives and garlic, onion, and artichokes. Dump them all into the pan.

Dice the tomatoes, and use your thumb to squoosh out the seeds into the sink.

You can skip the squooshing step if you're okay with tomato seeds in your sauce, but I prefer it without. (If you had to chop artichokes and olives a minute ago, skipping the squooshing will probably make up some time)

Toss the tomatoes into the pan. Olive oil and other stuff should be just starting to sizzle.

Add the wine or broth. Somehow, I managed to run out of wine, so I had to use broth. One or the other or any combination of the two would work.

Now, I'm not a fan of anchovies, but I do have fish sauce handy for making Thai and Vietnamese food... (totally missed them in the ingredient pic)

I've also got Lea&Perrins. Worchestershire sauce is actually a reasonable flavour substitute for the anchovies.

If you used all fresh tomatoes, you can skip this step. If all you had handy was half a basket of cocktail tomatoes, add the crushed tomatoes now.

Okay, so the base of out sauce is in the pan simmering, and the water is boiling. We've got 10 minutes left on the timer (that one's a bit easier to see).

Get your noodles going. You can use any kind you like, but keep in mind that angel hair and spagettini are going to cook much faster than something like a penne. If you need the extra time, a bigger shape may be in order. I hedged my bets with farfalle, a smaller shape, but with that crimp in the middle that always needs an extra couple minutes to finish.

Dice the sundried tomatoes (you could leave these out if you need to save dicing time) and black olives, and shred the basil. Dump these into the pan along with the capers.

Once everything is in and simmering, use a couple minutes to put all the jars away and tidy a bit. Check the consistency of your sauce. If it's too thin, turn the heat up a bit to bubble off some of the liquid. If it's looking too thick, you can add more wine now (just pour a bit in from that glass you've got in your hand), or broth. Or, if you used the last of your broth in the first round, a bit of the liquid from the kalamata olive jar will work.

How much time is left?

1 minute! Holy hell I did it. I totally cooked hooker noodles in less than 20 minutes.... Farfalle. Needed the extra minute to get the crimp to doneness so I stirred the sauce a little. (really, this is just a bit of food porn)

Once the pasta is finished, drain almost all the water off. Dump the pasta and that last bit of water into the sauce. The starch in the pasta water, and on the pasta, will thicken the sauce a bit and take care of that extra water.

Toss it all together and then pour it onto a plate.

Top it with some freshly grated parmesan, and if you're feeling the need for something a little more substantial, serve with a bit of sausage. Sausage is the perfect accompaniment for hooker noodles.

This made enough for dinner for one (poor lonely hooker that I am) and lunch for tomorrow (because I may not have all this time between clients to cook).

Have you ever timed yourself making dinner? What's your fastest dinner recipe?

Cookin it, old skool

It's still freaking hot, and I wanted cheesecake. Fortunately I have friends with recipes. Old Skool Recipes.

And zombie movies.

And what better to eat during a zombie movie than cherry cheesecake! Screw popcorn, chips, and nachos. If you're really going to get into things, you need to match the food to the flick. And we needed braaaaaiiinss.

Cherry brains!

On top of gooey, golden, lemony cheesecake.

No Bake Cheese Cake

What you need:

Crust:

• ~3 c graham cracker crumbs
• ~1/2 c butter

Filling:

• 1 8 oz block of cream cheese
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 1 tin of evaporated milk
• 1 pkg of lemon jello (no, really!)

Topping:

• 1 c water
• 1 c sugar
• 1 c dried cherries

What you gotta do:

We started with the topping. Combine the water and sugar in a medium pot over medium heat.

 

Once the sugar has dissolved and the syrup has started to bubble, add the cherries.

 

The plan here is to rehydrate these fabulous little things (omg they are the tastiest most luxurious dried fruit ever) and let their deliciousness infuse the basic sryup. The plan. That's it.

While the cherries are simmering, dump the crumbs into a 9 x 11 pan and spread them out. Drizzle the melted butter over them and start mixing.

 

A spoon is fine, but you'll probably end up getting your hands in there eventually to press it down into the pan. You want no more than 1/2 inch thick.

So, these next steps get a little dishes intensive, but hey, we're not at my house so I'm okay with that. :P

Start with the medium bowl and pour in the evaporated milk.

With a hand mixer, beat the milk for a few minutes. I'm thinking that you could also use whipping cream here, but you wouldn't want to whip it too much. Just enough to fluff it up, but not enough that you get peaks.

Take that off to the fridge to chill while you dirty more bowls. 

Next is the cream cheese. Dump it in the big bowl with vanilla and lemon juice.

Works best at room temp, but an electric mixer will bring it into line pretty quickly. Beat it up with the vanilla and the lemon juice. We didn't have lemons on hand, but the bottle will suffice in a pinch.

And in the third bowl, combine the lemon jello with one cup of boiling water. I'm thinking that you could get a sharper, brighter lemon flavour in this step if you went with plain gelatin and some lemon zest, but as I mentioned, no lemon, so we jello'd it. 

And if you mix it with the spoon that you used to scrap the sides of the cream cheese bowl, you get all kinds of fun cheesey floaties in the jello.

Don't worry, it's all going to end up in the same place. Let it cool for a bit so that you're not adding boiling hot stuff to your cold things. Hm. This step maybe should have come a little sooner. Oh well, it all worked out in the end. The cheesecake did.

And in it goes.

Cooled lemon gelatine mixture, chilled beaten evaporated milk (or whipped cream, if that's what you opted for) into the big bowl of lemony, vanillay cream cheese.

And beat it some more! Power tools are fun.

Once you've got it all combined and whipped up into a frothy gooey mess, pour it onto the crust.

Oh crap, the cherries.

Remove them from the heat and let them cool while the cheesecake chills in the fridge for a couple hours. It will be just barely jiggly when it's ready.

The cheesecake layer ended up a little shallower than we were hoping,

so you could do this in a smaller pan to get a ratio weighted more to the cheesecake, just make sure that you decrease the crumb amout so you're still below the half inch mark.

Now, the plan for the cherries (you remember the plan, right?) was to have a nice gooey syrupy pile of brains to pour on top of our cheesecake. Um.

Yes, that is the spoon stuck to the pot.

I highly recommend not boiling the cherries for as long as we did. And I have no idea how long we boiled them. Don't do that.

We ended up with something more like toffee than syrup. Very stringy toffee.

But, a little more heat was enough to get it moving again and we were able to blob some onto the cheesecake. The rest, we poured into a gratuitously buttered pan.

Cherry. Toffee. Okay, some things are good ideas after all. Chewy, stick your teeth together good.

Of course, the warm toffee melted the cold cheesecake, but it sure tasted good and it really did look like... BRAAAAAAAIIIIIINS!!!!

 

Now that you've got your braaaaiins, thick and chewy braaaaaiiiiins, all you need is a copy of Dead Snow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-KQh87_V2Q

Watch for the cherry topping. It's there.

I once knew a guy who would eat baked beans out of a pot with a wooden spoon while waching westerns so he could get right into the characters. Me, I'm happy with cherry brains for my zombie cheesecake.

What's your favourite food and movie combo?