Quick and delicious: Creamy parmesan fettucini with mushrooms and capicola

I love it when dinner comes together with minimal effort but tastes fantastic. That’s what happened tonight with this scrumptious fettucini dish, of which you see the remains. It was something I pretty much made up as I went along, so I’m giving you best guesses and approximates on measurements. This is best eaten day-of: there’s not quite enough sauce, as you might have with an alfredo, to keep the fettucini from drying out. So dig in and finish it off!

You’ll need:
1/6 lb spicy capicola ham
extra virgin olive oil
8-10 oz mushrooms (maybe 12 or 15 mid-sized fellas–I used cremini), sliced about 1/8-1/4″ thick
1/2 large onion, sliced thinly
2 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 T water
2-4 T half and half
2-3 T grated parmesan (I actually sliced it thinly with a knife so there’d be some bigger punches of flavor)
salt and pepper
6-8 oz dry fettucini

Start by getting some water boiling and your fettucini in there. It’ll take about 12 minutes to cook, for most brands.

In a big skillet, heat 1/2 T olive oil over medium-high heat. Thinly slice your ham and add it to the pot until it has rendered a bit of fat and spice and become a tad crispier. Set aside.

Add 1 T oil to pan. Add onion and a little salt. Adjust heat so it doesn’t brown up too fast. Cook until softened, about five or so minutes. Add mushrooms. Stir around and let them cook down, stirring occasionally, until softened, another five or so minutes, adding garlic in there somewhere. My pan got really dry and in danger of smoking, so I added a little water to speed the process along and keep the fire alarm from going off. Toss in a few flakes of red pepper, plenty of black pepper, and a pinch of dried basil. Stir, stir. Once softened, add cream to pan and bring to a gentle simmer for a minute, tossing in cheese to melt. Add fettucini and some water, if necessary, from the pasta pot. Toss to mix well. Add ham, toss, and serve. You can keep this vegetarian, too, by leaving the ham out and it’ll be just as good!

This Weekend’s Lesson(s)

I think I’ll make this a regular feature of the blog. Every Sunday, take stock, post lessons, however ridiculous.

Lesson 1. I’m not 20 anymore, and can’t eat like I am. Ugh, entirely fried beige meal=hours of discomfort. Because I’m evidently an old lady. Old enough

Lesson 2. Better weather makes exercise more appealing, and I really do feel better if I take a nice long walk.

Lesson 3. The cat deliberately gets us out of bed so he can snooze in it all day.

Very, very good granola. And thoughts on my own impatience.

At long last, I have made some granola that is delectable and unburned. It is not as though this really was months in the making; it’s not as though I haven’t made good granola in the past. It’s just that lately I’ve noticed my patience running a little thin, and it felt like forever.

Does anyone else out there find that their patience comes in bursts? Sometimes, I feel sage and wise, blessed with the infinite ability to tolerate silliness, perceived faults in others, bad cooking experiments. Other times, I am a short fuse, frustrated with pretty much anything. Bad granola, stupid banking mistakes, republicans, decrease in blog visitors since moving here and relative silence of the usual suspects–some of these things make me angry (see: republicans), other things make me doubt myself. Why did I make this stupid banking mistake? Do my friends not find my blogging interesting anymore? I am very lame when I get like this, and then I get impatient with my own silliness in asking such questions. Seriously. Lest you think this happens all the time, it really doesn’t–it comes and goes. I suspect that lately it has a lot to do with my impatience with the weather, the perpetual grayness and the sun that looks warm but which is lying to convince me to step outside and freeze my buns off.

But I digress. You came here for granola, didn’t you? Not my crazy psychobabble.

I cannot claim any credit for this recipe–I took it from Molly’s recipe over at Mommycoddle. I love Molly’s blog. I don’t have kids or anything, but I love reading about their endless adventures in a rehabbed farmhouse in the midatlantic. I also love reading about Molly’s endless quest for patience. I think it’s partly from her that I’ve adopted a new philosophy, which is to look around at whatever is bugging me, what’s creating chaos, and find either the humor in the situation (this is good with family) or some kind of silver lining, or at least put the situation in perspective.

The recipe, she says, is initially her grandmother’s and was intended to feed a heck of a crowd. It’s here, and you really should check it out. My scaled-back version involves:
1 lb oats
rough 6-8 T: brown sugar, canola oil, honey, and wheat germ, plus about 1/2 c of shelled pistachios, chopped

Mix and bake at 225–this filled up my cookie sheet and was a good inch deep, so, tossing every 15 minutes to prevent burning, it was done in about 2.5 hours. Then, per Molly’s directions, I let it cool in the oven. This was overnight–the next morning I added about 2/3 c of dried sweetened cranberries. This stuff is heaven. Thanks for sharing, Molly. I eat a 1/2c with milk every day, as does Mr. Pea, and we’re pretty happy with the stuff.

From the NYT–Homemade crackers

This was in the food and dining section today–they sound even tastier than my favorite cracker, Cheez-Its.

Parmesan Cream Crackers
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Published: February 2, 2009
Time: About 20 minutes

1 cup all-purpose flour, more as needed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup finely grated fresh Parmesan cheese
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup cream or half-and-half, more as needed
Coarse salt, pepper, sesame or poppy seeds, minced garlic or whatever you like for sprinkling (optional).
1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or lightly dust with flour. Put flour, salt, cheese and butter in bowl of a food processor. Pulse until flour and butter are combined. Add about 1/4 cup cream or half-and-half and let machine run for a bit; continue to add liquid a teaspoon at a time, until mixture holds together but is not sticky.

2. Roll out dough on a lightly floured surface until 1/2-inch thick or even thinner, adding flour as needed. Transfer sheet of dough to prepared baking sheet (drape it over rolling pin to make it easier). Score lightly with a sharp knife, pizza cutter or a pastry wheel if you want to break crackers into squares or rectangles later on. Sprinkle with salt or other topping if you like.

3. Bake until lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Cool on a rack; serve warm or at room temperature or store in a tin for a few days.

Yield: About 4 servings.

The glories of the whole bird

If I’d been smart, I would have taken a photo of our whole roasted chicken Sunday night before we carved it up. But, alas, I am rarely so bright! You’ll have to take my word that it was a nice-looking chickie. Beyond that, it’s also a very useful thing to cook, even for small families, every so often.

We bought an over-stuffer roaster this week at the grocery store. These birds are bigger than your average hen–this one was over 6 lbs. My mom cooked them a lot for the four of us when we were kids. The mister and I never buy chickens that large, except that they were running a ridiculous sale on them. The birds were 77 cents a pound. That meant that our bird was about $4.70. Nice. I roasted it–about 2 hours at 350, sprinkled with olive oil and a hefty dose of Penzey’s Northwoods Seasoning–and the two of us split one breast that night. That left us with a lot of chicken. Mr. Pea had half a breast for lunch Monday; I’ll have the other half on Tuesday. There’s still a lot of bird. So here’s my plan for the rest. I probably got about 5 cups of torn meat off the chicken after our meals were eaten–of that, about 3 c went into the freezer for later enchiladas or quesadillas or what have you; another 2 c will go into a chicken pot pie tomorrow. Mr. Pea picked up some frozen peas for that–otherwise we have everything on hand. We’ll likely get 6 slices out of that pie, or 3 servings each.

I took the birdie body and put it in a stock pot, covering it with water, and let it simmer away for 2 hours. It’ll need some salt and pepper later, but after draining the broth–carefully–through a colander, I had about 12 cups of broth. Sweeeet. This saves me from buying cans or cartons, both of which can be a little pricey, for a long time. I picked up some quart-sized freezer bags at the store and froze (in a freezer box thing, not right on the rack, having learned that lesson) 2 bags of four cups broth each (risotto sized), one bag of 2 cups (handy) and then put 2 cups in the fridge for tomorrow’s pie white sauce. Fantastic! And I know what’s in it, to boot! Not a lot of mystery ingredients there. So our little $4.70 bird–seemingly too big for just the two of us–has given or will give us 5 meals apiece, or 10 meals, plus a boatload of broth, plus more chicken for as-yet-unplanned meals. It’s not a bad investment!

Yum, yum, snickerdoodles

Snickerdoodles are a great cookie because most of the time, one has the ingredients on hand. They are very simple to make; we had them a lot when I was little, and throughout college my mom would mail packages of them to me and my very eager friends. When I’ve made them before, they never turned out like my mom’s–often they were crunchy instead of chewy, which kind of ruined them for me. Shortly before Christmas we went to Mr. Pea’s aunt and uncle’s for pizza and It’s a Wonderful Life, and his aunt was baking these as we came in. The trick, she told me, is to underbake them a little for chewy cookies. Eureka. No more collapsed, crunchy snickerdoodles here.

This is her recipe.

1 c shortening (I use Whole Foods’ trans fat-free variety)
2 3/4c flour
1 1/2 c sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 400. Cream 1-3 in a mixer. Once well blended, add the rest. Shape into 1″ balls, and roll tops in a mixture of 2 T sugar and 1 T cinnamon. Place on ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 7-10 minutes. 7-8 minutes will yield chewier cookies, 9-10 crunchier.

Things I learned this weekend

1. Assembling a quilt is even harder than I thought. I started putting the quilt top I made last spring (in the photo, right after I made it) together with the batting and the backing, and things got reallllll squirrely from there. I’m chalking all the quilt’s lumpiness up to inexperience–this is my first bed-sized quilt.

2. Roast chicken was better than chicken fingers for the super bowl.

3. Regardless of the intensity of the game, I’ll still fall asleep on the couch right before it ends.

4. Cookies are always good. Recipe for snickerdoodles to follow later.