A Little Alfredo Sauce Makes all the Difference.

I have just finished another helping of the the pasta sausage and peas thing I tossed together Sunday evening. I got a container of Butoni Light Alfredo Sauce. I know, for purists, "Light" Alfredo Sauce is missing the point, but it's reasonably decent and, let's face it, since I can't actually make Alfredo Sauce, I can buy a lighter version for myself. I don't NEED all the fat and calories of real.

One heaping tablespoon swirled amongst the serving and nuke for 2 minutes. Oh, is it good. Add a couple of muffins and a couple 3 cookies along with a 10 ounce bottle of grape juice and I have a decent lunch. I will need to make the meatloaf tonight.

Perry sent me a link to the following recipe from Giada De Laurentis' Food Network show.

Tagliatelle with Smashed Peas, Sausage and Ricotta Cheese

Ingredients

• 1 pound fresh or dried tagliatelle pasta (or other wide, long pasta)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 pound hot Italian sausage, casings removed
• 1 pound frozen peas, thawed
• 1 cup whole milk ricotta cheese
• 1 bunch fresh basil leaves chopped (about 3/4 cup)
• 1/4 cup fresh grated Pecorino Romano cheese
• 1 teaspoon salt

Directions

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook until tender but still firm to the bite, stirring occasionally, about 8 to 10 minutes if dry or according to package directions if fresh. Drain pasta reserving 1 cup of the pasta cooking water.

Meanwhile, in a large, heavy skillet heat the olive oil and garlic over medium-high heat and add the sausage. Use a wooden spoon to break up the sausage into bite-sized bits. When the sausage has browned, about 5 minutes. Remove and set aside. Add the peas to the pan and, using the back of the wooden spoon, smash the peas. Turn off the heat. Add the ricotta cheese along with the cooked pasta and toss to coat, adding the pasta cooking water in 1/4 cup additions, if needed, to make the pasta moist. Return the sausage to the pan. Add the basil, Pecorino Romano cheese, and salt. Toss gently to coat and serve immediately.

Now I ask you. What did peas ever do to you to deserve to be smashed?

I'm all out of sausage now. I'll have to try this the next time I have some in the house. Add a full-bodied red wine, a tossed salad with poppyseed dressing and a slice of cheesecake and there's a meal you could serve to impress anyone.

And it wouldn't take Alfredo Sauce, lightened or otherwise, to make it good.

Beverage: Grape Juice

Deb

Sunday in the Kitchen with Deb

When the cooking bug bites, it's best to scratch where it itches or itch where it scratches or get out the mixing bowls, I'm gonna run outta room today.

It started with yesterday's muffins. It was a new poppyseed muffin recipe and it turned out very good. It made a lot and they are now frozen to be grabbed when I'm late for work. I've always had a problem with muffins making more than the recipe says they will. That's technically not a "problem", per se, except I wonder if I'm doing something wrong when the recipe says, "Makes 12" and I have 16. I think I finally have the "Mix just until blended" understood, after several score years of baking.

The only thing that frustrates me is the lack of the small 2 - 3 cup bowls like the metal bowl you see. Cereal bowls just aren't the same for mixing in small quantities. You need to beat the eggs and add the milk to the beaten eggs before adding alternately with the flour. A cereal bowl sloshes the beaten egg milk mixture over the sides because the sides are sloped. In a mixing bowl, the sides are vertical. That mix you just made isn't going anywhere unless you get really rambunctious with your whisk.

This morning, I had a hankering for pancakes. That's another item I can freeze after I've had the two I want for breakfast. So, I wandered over to the cookbook shelves, yes, there are two of them, not counting the stack on top of the bookshelf and all the little flyers shoved on top of the cookbooks AND the box in the office with all the recipes I want to try, and I pulled out this book.

I'm a sucker for cookbooks. I have far too many of them. I love to cook, but it's just me and unless I'm absolutely positive it can be frozen to eat later or will make tasty lunches and suppers for the next couple of days, I don't want to cook and have food left over. I just tossed something that was white and green and fuzzy and had integrated itself with the plastic container in which it was stored.

I don't remember where I got this cookbook. The copyright is 1939 and the side is tabbed with regions of the country with distinctive cuisines. New England, Pennsylvania Dutch, Mississippi Valley, Southwestern, Wisconsin, are some of the tab names. It reflects a time, the end of the Great Depression, where making do with what you had or could get was how you lived. Yes, I have a Joy of Cooking, a Betty Crocker Cookbook, a Fanny Farmer Cookbook and dozens in between, but I thought, "Let's see what pancake recipes are in this."

I found several sections but this page was what I wound up making, the recipe at the bottom and adding whole wheat flour to the pancakes.

They came out very well. I also added a tablespoon of maple syrup to the batter which I'll need to remember as that was superb.

As I had butter softening for cookies to be made later I had to get my big Jewel Tea mixing bowl down. This is the "Autumn Leaf" pattern.

I collected this actively for a long time and have a small collection of pieces. This large mixing bowl is fairly heavy and it's kept up on the top shelf to be brought down when I'm out of bowls.

Tonight, I made a pasta, sausage and pea combo which is good but would definately benefit from a light covering of Alfredo Sauce. I can't make that. Some things, I've just given up on. I will stop by Dominicks tomorrow and pick up a container of it. I made enough pasta sausage that I will have that for at least 3 meals.

I am thinking about meatloaf. I haven't made meatloaf in ages. I have a great recipe for Italian Meatloaf. It has a layer of shredded mozzarella in the middle. I could make that, carve it into quarters and freeze it. Right now I'm not going anywhere for Thanksgiving. I could have meatloaf and sweet potato dressing and a salad and something chocolate for dessert. I could. I could seriously do that. I'm out of cracker crumbs however, to use as binding for the meatloaf.

Alfredo sauce and saltines now on the list. Might as well pick up some bananas and another box of Cheerios while I'm there. I could make those chocolate banana muffins! I haven't had those in ages. Or banana bread or use up this can of organic pumpkin or get some apples and make sauce or...

I stop for the day when there's no usable counter space. Tomorrow, I have to do dishes again.

Beverage: Grape Juice

Deb

A Laugh and a Half, but maybe you had to be there.

Most of the readers of this blog are fellow gamers. But there are a few who have no idea about this game. The introduction is for you. Everyone else can skip to the bottom two photos.

This is my character, Gimmlette, in the online game, World of Warcraft. She is a dwarf hunter class. That's my Core Hound, Huckleberry. There are several of this kind of pet in the game, modeled after the mythical Cerberus, guardian of Hell. Huck is from a place called Molten Core, where it's lava and fire and rock. One of his attack abilities is to breath fire. I got him because he's unique. Not very many people have a Core Hound as a pet. He's named Huckleberry because, well, extra rations of gruel if you can figure out why.

I've been playing since October of 2006. It's fun. It's what I do to relax. At the time this photo was taken, my character was at level 70. There have been two expansions, or additions, to the game since I started. The first took characters to level 70. The second, which came out a year ago, took characters to level 80, which is where Gimmlette is.

When I log into the game now, I have almost no challenges in terms of following what's called a "quest chain". One person will give you a challenge which, most of the time, leads to another challenge and so on. I have reached the stage where what I do is run "daily quests". As the name implies, they can be done every day for gold or something else. The pretend gold and pretend "Emblems of Triumph", for instance, can be redeemed for better armor or other things.

I come on and run 2 dailies in the capital city. Then in fly to a place called the "Argent Tournament Grounds" and pick up 7 more daily quests. They rotate among a selection. Some times, you can get the same quest several days in a row. That happened with the daily cooking quest. Ask me, some time, about meatloaf.

One of the daily quests from the tourney is to rescue a dwarf and 4 of his compatriots from this area just west of the grounds.

You are also to "off" 15 of the mobs holding his friends in cages. That's where I was on Friday when it got, well, interesting.

You see the small squares. Those are cages containing people who need rescuing. Mean baddies roam around this area and you have to kill them because they have the keys to open the cages. It's not just you doing this, however. You're also "enjoying" the company of any number of people who all have the same quest. Finding a live mob to kill can get difficult sometimes.

I was running around, with Huck, killing bad people, getting keys and opening cages. Another hunter showed up and tried to "steal" one of the mobs that I had targeted to kill. If you shoot or otherwise engage a mob before another person does, you get credit for that mob. There are people in this game who think nothing of running around tagging other people's mobs just to be mean. That's called "griefing" and is, technically, not allowed.

I don't know if that's what this person was doing. They had missed a couple of times to get a mob I had targeted. They ran to the right in the photo, near the edge of the area and attempted to hit another mob I had targeted. They missed again. So, to stop auto attacking, they did a maneuver called "Disengage". The hunter flies backwards. It's very useful if you get too close to use your bow or your gun.

Now you're all intelligent readers. You can probably see exactly where this is going. The other hunter didn't. He hit his "Disengage" and misjudged how close he was to the edge. All I have to say is, "It's a long way down." Your pet will disappear if you get a certain distance away from it. As I was laughing, his pet wolf disappeared.

Of course I've done it, not here, but in other places in the game. In fact, we've often talked about having all the hunters at the edge of a high cliff and the, on the count of 3, Disengaging over the cliff. The name of the guild is Spectacular Death for a reason. It would make an awesome recruiting statement.

I never got the person's name. I wish I had. I was going to send them an in-game letter telling them we'd decided to make them and honorary member of SD. That was just priceless. Fortunately, you're never obliterated in the game. You can run back and claim your body, assuming you can find it.

This area borders on a sea. I don't know if he would have hit the water from this ledge or if there is still land below. I just know that I was laughing so hard, I had to stop doing my quests for a bit.

Beverage: Robert the Bruce Scottish-style Ale

Deb

Major step

Just standing on the stairs, mom.

Yup, that's Mija on the basement stairs. It started at the beginning of October when I left the basement door open when I went to do laundry. Pilchard decided to see from where this noise was coming and came down the stairs. Of course, there are thousands of places to go in a basement and I wound up having to leave the basement door open and hope she would come upstairs when her curiosity was filled.

Since then, both have come downstairs, poked around and come back upstairs within 30 to 40 minutes of when I leave. In fact, today has been a test of sorts. I did a load of whites this morning and left the door open. Pilchard went back upstairs before I did, at half-time, when I was hanging up the wash and tossing the rugs into the machine. Mija went downstairs while I was mixing the muffins but came back up once I left the kitchen. Neither has been downstairs since.

This is good because the open basement door allows those musty basement smells to dissipate. Plus, in the winter, it seems to equalize the temperature in the house. I'm going to leave it open tonight and just see how we do. If there are no crashes in the night and no one has a face covered in cobwebs in the morning, I would say I can leave the basement door open, period.

And, I discovered, I'm going to need to buy cat food.

Val gave me what I think was a 20 pound bag, I honestly didn't look. It was big and took up lots of floor space in the kitchen. After two full months and one week of twice daily feedings, this is what I have left. The container will probably be empty by the end of the week. Fortunately, dry cat food I can afford.

Beverage: Blackberry tea

Deb