kitchen improv: white bean linguini

Kitchen Improv is where I read a recipe, in this case, this one, am missing many of the ingredients, go into the kitchen, and try to cook up something like it anyway, reconstructing the gist of what I read before.
So, I may have mentioned once upon a time that I had a lot of frozen white beans? Well, I still have some of them, and  I'm about to move, so it is time to Clean Up Frozen Things. Here is what I did.

1. Cook linguine. That part should be easy.
2. Fry up some onions and garlic in generous olive oil. I used three fat cloves of garlic and most of a small onion ("most" because part of it looked funny), but I would recommend using more, because garlic is awesome.
3. Add to this about a cup, heaping, of white beans, and a cup of chicken stock. Also salt, pepper, and a large portion of oregano.
4. Cook this down to sauce-like consistency, and mash up the beans as you go. If you are impatient and have too much liquid, which I did, you can add tomato paste--which I had, and the original recipe had sun dried tomatoes in it so I thought something tomatoey would be good. The exciting part about this is that I do not have a can opener, although I have canned goods, because it got rusty or something and my roommate threw it away. In this situation, you can still open cans by poking a hole in them with the back end of a hammer, and then cutting a hole with a knife. Tomato paste cans are a poor choice, because they are small and thus more structurally intact, and also their contents don't pour, so then you have to scoop it out spoonful by spoonful while attempting not to cut yourself on the ragged metal edges of the little hole you made. Guys, I don't recommend this course of action. Keep your rusty can openers. Anyway, add maybe half the tomato paste.
5. Serve! Add lots o' cheese.

This produces about two portions of sauce, I'd say. It needed to be slightly more vigourous in flavour, but I am not sure what it needed, so I'll go with garlic. Maybe salt, too. It was pretty delicious, but it needs beta-testing. I wouldn't make it for a dinner party, but maybe for people who were hungry and not judgmental would like it.

Lemon-Garlic Salmon

Ingredients

2 slices salmon
2 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp lemon juice
salt
pepper
flour

1. Sprinkle salt and pepper on the salmon, then coat in a thin layer of flour.
2. Heat olive oil in a pan, then fry (?) the salmon until golden brown and cooked fully through.
3. When salmon is done, remove from pan. Add butter and garlic to pan, and sauté on low heat.
4. Add soy sauce and lemon juice, and when the sauce starts to bubble, add salmon back into pan to coat with the sauce.
   

Lemon "Tartar" Sauce

This is like a 2-minute recipe for a great sauce that goes especially well with white fish (baked):

mayonnaise	３tbsp
lemon juice	２tbsp
sugar	１tbsp
salt
pepper olive oil

Mix everything together, and you're done! This serves about three. For those adverse to using 3 tbsp of mayonnaise (like me), you can substitute at least half of it with an equivalent amount of plain yogurt. I used Trader Joe's European Style Nonfat Plain Yogurt, which has a loose consistency ideal for a sauce.

Scallop, Mushroom, and Onion Pasta

Seafood and (pasta) sauces seem to be a recurring theme here, so I'll add another recipe for good measure. This recipe was developed by a Japanese man who works full-time, so it's pretty basic but still very good.

1 small onion
mushrooms (any kind, and as much as you want)
4-5 large frozen scallops (obviously they don't have to be frozen, and you can use more)
olive oil
pasta
garlic (either chopped or in paste form)
salt
pepper

See? Already the lack of actual measurements in the ingredients points to how easy this recipe is.

Getting the timing of the steps in this recipe just right in order to maximize time and energy efficiency can be a little tricky since there are variations on how long the particular pasta you have takes to cook or how fast you can prepare the other ingredients, but here is my interpretation on how things should be done:

1. Remove scallops from the freezer. To help with defrosting quickly rinse them and leave them out.
2. Slice the onion and mushrooms thinly, and set aside.
3. Cook the pasta according to the directions on the package, but cut the cooking time short by 1-2 minutes.
   
4. While the pasta is cooking, heat a small amount of olive oil in a pan and cook the garlic until aromatic (that is a term outside of chemistry, right? I'm very serious about this question.) on low heat. Then add the onions and mushrooms, and cook on medium heat until the onion turns translucent.
5. When the pasta is done, add two ladlefuls of the pasta water (?) to the pan, add the scallops, and continue to cook.
6. After the scallops are just about cooked, mix the pasta and onions/mushrooms/scallops together, and cook briefly on high heat. Add salt and pepper to taste.
   

Peanut Sauce

I had a bunch of extra coconut milk from making the challenge so I decided that a good thing to do with it is to make peanut sauce. This is super easy and delicious. I made lots and lots of it this summer when I was too overheated (and too temporarily situated) to go buy lots of ingredients and all I had was vinegar, soy sauce and sriracha for seasoning things.

The basic version (all measurements are approximate, it won't matter really) :

Peanut butter: about 2, 3 heaping spoons.
Sriracha sauce (to taste)
Soy sauce (about a teaspoon)
vinegar or tamarind liquid (a few teaspoons) If you know how to deal with tamarind it is totally the way to go.
about cup of water or coconut milk. It's totally fine with water. The coconut milk version is probably too rich to use as say a pasta sauce.

Stir this up in a saucepan. It will look gross and terrible. Don't worry. When the peanut butter is more or less in suspension (there shouldn't be any huge chunks in the bottom of the pan), but it on the stove and bring to a boil. This is the tricky bit. For a while it will bubble normally, but then it will start to thicken and the bubbles will rise in the pan. When this happens be ready to take it off the heat very quickly because soon it will start spattering like a mud pot at Yellowstone. You should preferably have it off the heat right before it starts doing this. It is now done!

Put it on anything you think it will be nice on. The most recent batch I made found its way onto some poached chicken and cucumber slices.

The other dish on the plate was my rendition of the cooking challenge.

Things to put on pasta!

My most recent cooking exploits have focused on making sauce-like substances to put on the cheap and delicious ravioli I recently bought at Trader Joes (sorry for all of you who are living in Europe and unable to use this resource).

I decided that a good thing to do would be to take some Italian sausage and cook it up with onions and garlic and mushrooms. This worked very nicely. As a variation in order to use up the rest of the sausage I put some green pepper and fresh tomato in as well to make it more resemble a conventional pasta sauce. I used a random pepper that wasn't a bell pepper since I don't like bell peppers.

I guess some preparation directives are probably in order here:
Start by putting the sausages (removed from their skins) in a largish frying pan no cooking oil is necessary. Break up the meat with your stirring implement. Once there is enough grease in the pan to be getting on with put in onions and garlic and green pepper (half an onion and a clove or two are enough to go with 2 sausages). Don't worry about things sticking to the bottom of the pan. Once things look slightly golden brown around the edges, pour a little water into the pan and scrape up the stuck bits, boil out the water and add mushrooms. You might want to do the deglazing ritual again. Add your tomatoes (peeled if you don't like random bits of tomato skin in your sauce) and let them cook down and make this creation more or less sauce-like. Solid pieces of tomato are fine though.

The most important part is addition of herbs and spices though. While you are frying add various herbs from the obvious (basil, oregano, black pepper) to the less (thyme and sage). Make sure to put some red pepper flakes or cayenne or something like that in too (if you like things to be slightly spicy).

You can make this is quantity and keep it around for all your pasta sauce needs.

garlic-honey-mustard sauce

Remember red-spice chicken, everyone? I don't actually, because I avoided it as much as I possibly could. Point is, HUDS did not do delicious chicken, and then they tried to hide it in a sauce. In real life, though, chicken can be truly delicious, because you can make it tender and not cardboard-flavoured. However, sauce is still a wondrous thing, especially if the meat in your life is almost entirely chicken (because it is cheap) and so you want variety. And spice is the variety of life. So here is an easy thing my friend mentioned the other day:
6 cloves garlic
2 Tbsp hot brown mustard
2 Tbsp honey
all roasted together, and then spread on whatever you want. However, thanks to the wonders of AT&T, I didn't have internet yesterday between basically any time range in which I might want dinner, so I couldn't see his exact proportions. I did I Tbsp of honey and 4 tsp of mustard and then thinned it out with olive oil, and that turned out very delicious also. As an added bonus you get all this nice hot honey stuck in your pan that you can burn your fingers on because you want to partake of its deliciousness.
So anyway that is something that is easy and makes good food.

No-cook pasta sauce

I am homeless/nomadic right now, so I don't have a lot of ingredients on hand. But I found an excellent recipe in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (upon whose virtues I will wax poetic in a later post).

I am in general pretty unimpressed with pasta sauce in jars. It is too expensive to buy interesting ones, and I hate having the half empty jars in my refrigerator. This means that, whenever I make pasta, I need to make my own sauce. Today, I didn't want to make my own sauce. But pasta was essentially the only caloric foodstuff in my friend's kitchen (besides straight oil and chocolate).

The recipe that I found is as follows: mash up some fresh tomatoes with some cloves of garlic, add salt and fresh-ground pepper and fresh basil, remove the garlic from the sauce, put the sauce on pasta, then top with parmesan. I didn't have fresh basil (because my plant is elsewhere), but this still turned out to be pretty delicious. And it literally took 5 minutes to prepare.

Things I plan to buy (if my future kitchen doesn't have them):

-A basil plant
-A pepper grinder (and fresh pepper)
-A block of parmesan
-A grinder