TracyFood

Foto Friday: Linguine Alfredo recipe, for Piett. 15 January 2010 11:08 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cheese,convenience,cooking,eating,eugene,family,Holland,hot mess,Netherlands,pasta,photos,pictures,random,recipes,restaurants,vegetarian,work , add a comment

So I’m back from Holland and recovering from the trip, but still pretty freaking tired and nowhere near done uploading and organizing all the pictures I took. Today’s photo post was going to be all about flying fancy-style, but like I said, I haven’t quite got those pictures processed. Instead, I’m going to blog my dinner, which happens to relate back to my trip in more than just the “so tired, can’t get stuff organized” way. You see, on Tuesday night my brother Piett and I made a huge pasta dinner for my parents, my Oma, my aunt Ingrid, uncle Dako, their daughters Stéphanie and Claudia, and Stéphanie’s boyfriend Raymond (to be perfectly fair, Claud made her own food but I was still happy to have something that almost everyone could agree to eat). We cooked 1 1/2 kilos of spaghetti and three different sauces for people to mix and match to their own tastes: tomato-meat, tomato-vegetable sauce, and creamy pesto. Piett was an awesome sous-chef, and somewhere in the chatting over cooking we got to the topic of Alfredo sauce. My basic point was that it’s super-easy, and Piett said he’d like me to show him how to make it some time. While this post is not the video podcast recipe he suggested, it’s a step in that direction.

Linguine Alfredo: it’s what was for my dinner tonight.

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Monkey Monday: cooking and reading 4 January 2010 3:21 pm

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,hot mess,kitchen mishaps,monkeys,not even vegetarian,pasta,photos,pictures,pizza,random , 1 comment so far

As always, I am hopelessly behind on about a million things I want to read (at least more than a thousand in Google Reader alone, for instance) but I wanted to share a few fun things I’ve drifted past while going with the “too much information” flow. I will begin and end, however, with stuff I’ve cooked recently, because I am so not even a little bit modest about the awesomeness.

Stuff I’ve cooked recently

Check out this fabulous penne alla vodka we made with duck prosciutto (made by a Columbia Greenmarket vendor whose name I cannot remember). So delicious!

Also, I kinda dig the refracted view of Peter’s plate through the glass there.

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Monkey Monday: thoughts on a theme, and more. 30 March 2009 8:55 am

Posted by Tracy in : cooking,geekery,Harold McGee,monkeys,pasta,pictures,random , add a comment

First things first: last week, I made Harold McGee’s One-Pan Pasta With Garlic and Oil, and it worked:

Readers, I put raw noodles into cold water — and way less water than the recipe/back of the box standard — and they came out. Yes, the texture was a little different than the pasta I’m used to, but boy monkeys is this trick going to save us a lot of white gas on future camping trips! Coming up later this week: more pictures and comments on the experiment.

Along those same lines, I continue to enjoy Rachel Laudan‘s blogging on fuel, water, and pasta, which led to a great post on fire, water, and salt.

Speaking of cooking fuel and efficient resource usage, this coming Wednesday, April 1, is the deadline for voting on the Financial Times / Forum for the Future Climate Change Challenge and I for one think the Kyoto Box solar stove is a super-cool idea, not just because of the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions but also because of all the potential energy saved — human energy and time spent collecting firewood, that is. So go read about cool inventions, and vote for your favorite, even if it isn’t the shiny, shiny stove.

Also on my mind this week: (more…)

Another belated Monkey Monday. 2 March 2009 1:43 pm

Posted by Tracy in : consumerism,cooking,geekery,Harold McGee,news,pasta,pictures,random,school , add a comment

Lateness and weird timing have sort of been a theme for me lately, dangit. Later this week I will post about the 24-hour food record I did for my nutrition class, and the weird timing issues around that assignment (Superbowl Sunday was seriously the closest I could get to a “normal” day to record). Last week’s timing was such that I was too busy having a sinus infection to do my supermarket participant observation until darn near the very last minute on Thursday — but as always, food stores are completely fascinating to me and the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle is no exception. Check out this awesome shelf tag: