Cramming my face off

It's exam time. I barely have time to brush my teeth, never mind cook.

There are flashcards on the back of the toilet, sticky notes on the walls, and my couch is covered in physics problems. If you think I'm making dinner this week, you are sorely mistaken.

I'm doing my best to eat more than coffee, tortilla chips, and beef jerky, but I've got 2 more exams to go, and I've had to wash forks to eat my last two meals. 

Exams mean I don't have time to wash dishes either. Coffee cups don't need to be washed, only rinsed.

One of the few clean things left in the cupboards is the food processor. Yeah, I know, pain in the ass to wash, but there's really no other way to make pesto.

Pesto

What you need:

• Basil leaves
• Olive oil
• Garlic
• Pine nuts
• Romano or parmsan cheese (real cheese! not Kraft!!)

No, I didn't measure. I didn't have time to measure. There are finals looming! (um, yes, I know I promised to write shit down. I didn't mean I'd do it during exam week).

What you gotta do:

Tear the basil leaves up a bit, ripping the stems off. You'll have about a cup (measurement; happy? better be).

Put the leaves and the garlic and a bit of olive oil in the food processor.

Mine has a regular sized bowl and a mini-bowl. Mini is all you need. If you're doing this in a regular sized one, you might want to double the recipe. Double a recipe with no measurements. Ha. I kill me.

Put the lid on and run it.

If it's sticking to the sides, stop the machine. Or if it's like mine take the lid off. Poor safety engineers; they go through their days having to assume that everyone on the planet is a total fucking moron. Well, it's kinda true. Any time you think to yourself "no one's dumb enough to try that" you just guaranteed that some jackass will try it.

So, pesto. Scrape down the sides and pour in another blob (technical term, very foodie, an actual measurement) of oil. Replace the lid and let it whir a bit more.

Add some pine nuts. Some, more than none, but not too much.

Whir until the pine nuts are no longer discernable.

Now, the grated cheese. Can I say "to taste" here instead of telling you how much? Is did "to taste" a valid measurement?

And another whir.

Look! You made pesto.

Don't you feel fancy.

And what do we do with fancy pesto?

Well, I'm sure you could do something like some kind of grilled steak over linguini with a pesto and cream sauce, or mix it with chevre and fill butterflied chicken breasts with it, or mix it into cream cheese and bake it to make a creamy, cheesey pesto dip.

Me, I made pizza. (Dude, I'm in freaking university and I have a final exam tomorrow, what did you expect me to do?)

Slices of half stale baguette, smeared with pesto, topped with onion, tomato slices and chevre.

      

Baked at 350 until I decided I needed to take them out of the oven and get back to studying.

Would you tell me if I had pesto in my teeth??

Noodle Fu!

I learned to make this Cantonese dish when I worked in a small town Chinese restaurant. It's amazingly simple to make, but it really doesn't taste simple. It's 3 of the 4 food groups in one dish, so it's healthy, and it uses a relatively cheap cut of beef (and the other ingredients cost virtually pennies) so it's a great budget dinner. And it's fast. From start to finish you can be eating in probably about 20 minutes.

The trick to the fast cooking is a hot pan. You're going to have to be ready for it. Crunch time can create the feeling that multi-tasking is the best way to go, but this, you really need to just take a breath and do all the chopping first before you start putting things in the pan. Besides, there isn't much chopping and 5 minutes of doing one thing only won't kill you. It might kill me, but you should be fine. 

Chow fun noodles, the namesake of this dish, are wide flat rice noodles. You (well, I) buy them fresh in the deli part of the grocery store. They're usually near the tofu, so if yours keeps tofu near the veggies, that's where they might be, but mine keeps all the asian foods next to the sushi stand which is near the deli...

Anyway.

Beef Chow Fun

What you need (you need to take the freaking coffee pot of the counter when you're taking pictures of dinner):

1/2 lb flank steak, or some other not expensive cut of lean beef
2 tsp peanut oil
1 tsp sesame oil
1 inch chunk of ginger, minced or grated
a few cloves of garlic, minced
1 onion, sliced
1 pkg noodles (separate them by hand a bit before you toss them in)
soy sauce
few handfuls of beansprouts
2 green onions, chopped,
handful of cilantro, chopped
lime juice (optional)

What you gotta do:

Since you need to have everything chopped and ready to go before you start cooking, do the fresh stuff first, then the veggies you're going to cook, then the meat. You'll end up needing (and having to wash) only one cutting board that way, and still manage to avoid cross contamination. 

If you're using the lime, chop it in half. Chop the cilantro, and the green onions. Set these aside on a clean plate to keep them away from the raw meat. 

Mince the garlic and ginger. If you have lemongrass, and feel like using it, mince about a tablespoon of it. I had lemongrass, so I used it.

I also had a few lemongrass stalks that I'd put in water a while ago... they've got roots!

Cut the onion in half and then slice each half into widths similar to your noodles. Noodle widths will vary but are usually about half an inch (or 1 cm if you are anywhere in the world other than the US).

If your onions are freakishly strong and your eyes water just looking at them, cover them with a wet paper towel. Onions contain sulphur compounds that combine with the water in your eyes to make sulphuric acid. (Inorite! Ouch!) The water in the towel will absorb the compounds and prevent it from getting into your eyes. And yes, it's safe to touch, it's not strong acid or anything, it's just that the amount it takes to irritate eyes is ridiculously miniscule.

Slice the beef into thin strips, going against the grain of the meat.

Now that you've got everything chopped and ready (see, took no time at all) heat half the peanut oil in a wide flat pan (or a wok if you have one) over medium high heat. Add half the sesame oil, half of the ginger, half of the garlic, and all the beef.

Stir fry until the beef is mostly browned, just a few minutes, and then remove it from the pan.

Add the rest of the peanut oil to the pan, and once it's hot, the rest of sesame oil, the rest of the ginger and garlic, and all the onions.

Give them a minute or so of being shoved around in the hot oil before you add the noodles and soy sauce. All you're really doing to the noodles is heating them until they separate from each other. Breaking them up by hand a bit before you add them helps, as does a minute with a cover on the pan.

Once the noodles have softened and separated, put the beef back in the pan, add the beansprouts, cilantro, green onion and lime juice. Toss until it's all combined and heated.

This makes dinner for two and a bit of leftovers for lunch the next day.

Chopped peanuts probably wouldn't be out of place in this dish, but they didn't add them at the restaurant so I don't.

I love noodles. It's really hard to get anything decent in Winnipeg that's got good noodles in it. For some reason, chow mein here means stir fried cabbage with deep fried egg noodles on top as a garnish. No, I have no clue why; it makes no sense to me at all. It just means that I never go out for Chinese here. Why would I? I can make it myself. And it's only one pan to wash! ;)

What's your favourite noodle dish?