Last Wednesday we decided to venture into the kitchen yet again, simply put, because we always have fun cooking together (I think it’s fun because we rarely do it and because we are equally ‘talented’ so there’s no competition). I even suspect we always like the end result so much because it’s made by us, so you could say we are biased.
We decided on pasta because it’s the quickest dinner and you can put whatever you want/like in it and they still turn out edible. Yes, we followed absolutely no recipe, as per usual. The quantities used are for ten servings because we needed to feast on pasta the entire week, not because as we have no idea what we are doing in the kitchen hence we bought a ton of stuff…no, that wasn’t the actual problem at all….good thing we have pots large enough for these kinds of errors!
What we used:
- 250 gr of basil tagliatelle (amazingly good taste)
- 250 gr of wholewheat tagliatelle (we needed to lie to ourselves that we were eating healthy)
- 15 gr fresh basil (I could put basil into anything I cook)
- 200 gr red onion (2 medium onions but it sounds more scientific in grams)
- 3 jalapeño peppers (we like everything hot)
- 1 garlic clove
- 30 gr chives (as with basil, I could use chives for everything)
- 50 gr grated parmesan (because…pasta!)
- 200 gr red cheddar (because we just came from the UK and we missed the taste of cheddar)
- 100 gr sliced Kalamata olives
- 800 gr Jamie Oliver‘s tomato&garlic pasta sauce (tried it for the first time and it was good)
- 1 tsp Jamie Oliver‘s green pesto (had it already from our last adventure in the kitchen)
- 500 gr brown mushrooms (because according to D, they are better-I couldn’t feel any difference, but they do look better in the pics)
- 250 gr diced bacon (yeah, we messed the ‘healthy’ part with this one)
- 1 Tbsp Olive oil (see this post to know which type we like best)
How things went in our kitchen:
D chopped all the ingredients, took photographs (hence the much nicer photos than my last food post), and I came in for the easy part. In my defence, I did have a lot of work to do that day.
How you get from ingredients to food:
- Heat the olive oil in a pot. If you’re cooking for 10, like we did, make sure you have a large pot as a lot of ingredients will have to fit into it.
- Fry the chopped onions until it turns golden (that’s about 5 minutes stirring continuously)
- Throw in the sliced garlic and fry for another 2 minutes.
- Put the chopped chives, basil and jalapeño pepper over the onion-garlic combo and fry for another 2 minutes.
- It’s time to turn this half healthy mix into something totally unhealthy by adding the bacon and letting it fry for about 4-5 minutes.
- Put the pasta into a pot with water, a tsp of olive oil and salt (keeps the pasta from becoming sticky) and bring to boil.
- Back to the other pot (you need to be a decent multitasker for pasta), add half of the sliced olives and then slowly add the mushrooms (if the ‘stew’ becomes too moist, just drain off some of the water).
- Time to add the rest of the olives (ignore the other pot as the pasta is not boiled by this step)
- Add half of the sauce (1 jar) and bring to boil stirring constantly for about 1 minute (check the other pot to see if the pasta decided to be ready-pasta, tagliatelle especially are very tricky to get to the right consistency)
- Back to the sauce pot, mix a teaspoon of pesto and 3/4 of the grated parmesan (the rest of the parmesan will be used for decorating the plate for photos). Let everything boil for 1 minute.
- Add the other jar of sauce, 10 gr of the chopped basil and 20 gr of chives (the rest is for decorating), stir well and let it boil for 1 min (noticed how we went from fry to boil? That happened because of the mushrooms that tend to leave a lot of water).
- Put 2/3 of the cheddar over the whole mixture, stir well until integrated and take the pot off the cooker. At this point, the sauce is technically ready, all you have to do is pour it over the pasta.
- Make sure, that while you’re holding a knife, you check with the other person (D in my case) that they have everything written down and nice photos of every step-it is very important to check all that holding an impressive knife!
That’s it! Now it’s time to decorate a plate for Instagram/blog pics and eat.
Keep in mind that the nutritional information shown here is for 10 servings, therefore, one serving will provide you around 450 kcal. This is not the healthiest of foods, but it is quite filling and satisfying taste-wise.
As a side note, we have cooked pasta before , also for 10 (because we never seem to learn how much stuff to buy) but it has never ever take us 4 hours from the point we started chopping until the moment we started eating. It took us that long because apparently taking pics and notes of everything takes a lot of time, but by the time we got to the eating part it was socially accepted to drink wine so we are not complaining.
L.
evenlymatched.eu 
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