Showing posts with label five ingredient pasta toss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label five ingredient pasta toss. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

"Love people. Cook them tasty food."

I got this free bumper sticker from Penzeys Spices (http://www.penzeys.com/) which is an amazing spice store. If you haven't been there, go! I highly recommend their vanilla and taco spice. Anyway, I got this bumper sticker which is hanging on the fan above our stove:


On that note, Isaac and I decided to start cooking more dinners. We've been eating out quite a bit lately, which is expensive and not very healthy. So we each picked two nights a week to make dinner. Tonight is my first night. I cook on occasion, but I am not very adept. I hope to keep note of my cooking endeavors here. I will try to post helpful hints for those who, like me, know very little about cooking.

So I used this recipe tonight: Five Ingredient Pasta Toss. It calls for olive oil, bow-tie pasta (I bought the Barilla Plus brand because it is healthy and tasty), a couple of garlic cloves, fresh basil, white beans, and fire-roasted diced tomatoes. All of this was fine for me. Except the garlic. First, I mis-read and only needed two cloves when I bought two heads... So I need to find other things to do with the other one...

So I needed to crush the garlic cloves and combine them with the olive oil. I didn't really know how to work with garlic, so like the all-modern-woman, I googled it. This video was super awesome (and it worked!): How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds. From there I could handle chopping and crushing, but here is a pretty good little video just in case: Garlic: Easy way to crush garlic.

Here is how my garlic turned out! So proud.


Just like the video!



And this is how the dish turned out. (Of course, I should probably invest in some serving bowls or something...)


And the verdict?

The garlic flavor didn't come through quite as well as I'd hoped and the whole could use a little salt and pepper. But otherwise, it was good. Isaac also approved. I call this fairly successful and I know how to change it for next time.