Spaghetti & Cheese (Again)

Spring break is next week and I think it would be wise to use up as much stuff in the fridge as possible. Well, there is no way I can do that (Actually...I can. I really can eat all the food in my fridge within a week). So, I'm starting with the perishable stuff. Cheese, chili peppers, onion, and milk = spaghetti and cheese.

Ingredients with missing weight amounts because I just kinda threw them together...makes something like 5-6 servings.
250ish ml milk
200ish ml water
Mustard if you have it  (but I don't :( )
Rest of the chili peppers
Small red onion
TVP*
herbs!

300g (?) Monterey Jack cheese
2 tbsp flour

A lot of cooked spaghetti

1. Throw first bunch of stuff onto stove and wait until bubbles. Unfortunately, the milk curdled for me, but in the end the sauce turned up smooth enough.
2. Throw in flour and stir until lumps have sort of disappeared.
3. Throw in cheese, mix, turn down heat.
4. Turn off heat, throw in spaghetti.

*I usually throw the dry TVP into my cooked pasta+water. This way, the TVP gets evenly distributed throughout the pasta, it rehydrates rapidly (because it's hot water), and I save heat/water! Yay! Neat trick.

Fritatta Thing!!

EXAMS ARE OVER.

I can write about food now for a month (before school gets hectic again)!! TJ and I made some sorta frittata thing with broccoli and a LOT of smoked cheese and garlic. We also put in uncooked spaghetti, which was a good idea for the parts of the pasta that were smothered in egg/broccoli/water/cheese mixture, but was otherwise crunchy. The original disposable aluminium container had a hole in it, and in the oven, egg mixture started dripping out :( So I had to switch pans).
 CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE.

Endive

Endive. A character from Chowder. I've always known it as some lettuce-y thing, perhaps deep green, with leaves like holly, except more spindly and elongated. Well, I was wrong. Endive is to spindly holly the way a stingray is to a blubbery blue whale. Endive looks like this:

and I never knew.

 So... what do I do with endive? Why would I try this? Well, it was homework, from my mentor at Monell. We're discussing bitter foods and why people eat them, and of course, genetics plays a large role. For example, I personally don't find broccoli bitter at all, but some people with a different haplotype think that it is bitter. My mentor thinks that endive is really bitter, but for me... it was pretty much lettuce. Watery, slightly lettuce-stem-y, ending with a slight bitter note. Bitter melon is definitely more bitter. Raw asparagus is more bitter. Heck, weak coffee is more bitter, in my opinion. See, I love Monell because I'm doing research, sort of, by exploring new foods and applying these scientific taste ideas into my life. Another perspective that I've never considered is this idea, which I've simplified here for lay understanding: 

In a sandwich, there's:

1. Sweet in onion

2. Umami in tomato

3. Bitter in watercress

4. Sweat odor in cheese

5. Boar taint in ham

Let's say I have the genotype +/+ for 1. and 2. Let's say SP has the +/+ genotype for 3. 4. and 5. This means that I'd enjoy the sandwich much more than SP would. 

(Reed, Danielle R., and Antti Knaapila. "Genetics of Taste and Smell: Poisons and Pleasures."Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science 94 (2010): 231. Print.

Reference: DOI: 10.1016/S1877-1173(10)94008-8)

I know it's an oversight, but I've never considered haplotypes in taste receptors as a reason why people would dislike the taste of a soup or a marinade. It just never occurred to me.

My mentor told me that they make the white endive by putting opaque bags over them so that there is no chlorophyll development (therefore, no green pigment). This reminds me of white asparagus. I guess I personally prefer there to be chlorophyll, because I like green. Also, chlorophyll has magnesium, which I would ingest, and I don't know enough plant biology to know whether white plants have magnesium stored elsewhere...

 So, what to do with endive? Cook it? I prefer to eat leafy vegetables raw, though. I just ripped it up and stuck it in some spaghetti with chili sauce and Chinese spiced bamboo shoots.

I also stuck some in a crunchy peanut butter sandwich with dried cranberries. This isn't weird for me because I love lettuce and peanut butter sandwiches. I also love cucumber and peanut butter sandwiches. Actually, I'm sure any vegetable goes well with peanut butter. Yes, even tomato (tomato in a peanut curry would probably be fantastic. I might try that one day).

Err Chard.

Y'know how raw tomatoes taste delicious? And how they taste similar to cooked tomatoes?

Now let's talk about chard.

Raw chard is terrible. Urg! So bitter and weird-tasting and fibrous! I put it in my sandwich (just the leafy part) and it was...pretty bad.

So I decided to cook it for a long time in my spaghetti and it was, can you believe it, sweet! I am not kidding. Sweet stems. They were so bitter, throat-burning, and fibrous raw! Now, cooked, they are tender, sweet/mild, and sorta like really baby celery!

It also stains my spaghetti pink, which is cool.

Dollar Stroll and Spinach.

So, I've finally been living on my own in Philadelphia, and I'll be here for another two months with a Mon-Fri 9-5 job. Technically, it's an internship, and I don't get paid much (a lot goes to taxes too. Wonderful.), but it's still nice experience for my future in science.

I'm actually not even living on campus, so I don't go outside after it gets dark (not that I have any need to, since there are no things to study for at libraries). But, it's summer, so it's still light outside at 6pm (as opposed to January)! Today was the Dollar Stroll. A bunch of stores on Baltimore Ave (from 42st St to around 50th...that's how far I walked because it got really empty after 50th) offer smallish portions of food for $1 each. By "smallish portions", I mean one tofu slider, one cupcake, one samosa, one scoop of ice cream, or one brownie. Actually, maybe I take back the "smallish portions" part, because a cupcake certainly costs more than $1 in Philadelphia, and samosas probably cost around $6-$10 for a plate of 3 or 4 at any fine restaurant.

I didn't know that the Dollar Stroll was so popular; I saw lines of people that wound around the block, college kids chatting, slurping ice cream, eating kebabs, drinking juices, and even a woman rollerblading and chatting on her phone in the bike lane. According to college kids here, it's not a good idea to venture to West Philly alone, but there were so many people, it was interesting walking to 50th and back, because I've never gone past 43rd St. before. On the way, though, I realised that I didn't fit in at all; I was ethnically very very part of the minority, I was ignored/left alone, and the scene was just really different; it was exclusive in the sense that you had to know someone at the stores to feel comfortable (or I'm just paranoid). It wasn't like NYC, because NYC is literally lined with shops and stuffed with people everywhere. The reason the Baltimore Dollar Stroll spans some 10 streets is that each street only has one or two restaurants/stores. That's it.

I guess living on my own for the past few days has made me realise that food costs a lot. Okay, let me rephrase; it's made me realise that produce costs a lot. It's not like I didn't know this before, but now I've caught myself wondering how necessary vegetables are. They're vital, of course! But what if I eat Chipotle instead of buying a bag of carrots and celery?

It's kind of weird to be thinking in terms of Calories and % daily values. I think I'm becoming too reductionist in making food choices. However, how else do I make food choices? What if I had bought a samosa, a brownie, a kebab, and an ice cream? $4. A nice cheap dinner, but completely devoid of anything nutritious.

So instead, I went to the farmer's market at Clark Park (it turns out that the actual market is on Saturdays) for the first time, and bought a bag of spinach for $3.75 and I made acquaintances with the two girls who sold me the spinach. I'm not sure how much spinach is, generally speaking, in University City. With taking the reductionist approach, however, $3.75 for 6ish servings of iron and vitamin A etc. vs. $4 for one serving of not-many-nutrients seems to show that the spinach was a better choice.

I'm surprised I actually have 6ish servings of spinach, actually. Okay, I don't know for sure that it's 6 servings, but I took approximately 1/6th of the bag of spinach out today, ripped the huge leaves to smaller pieces, washed it, saw the water turn green due to the chlorophyll, and stuck the leaves with my (already cooked) bean & garlic spaghetti. Dude, this is fresh spinach. You don't eat this spinach cooked!

While I was eating, one of the girls who lives in this house (I'm just renting a room) walked into the kitchen and took a red pill and some coffee to her room. I don't really care what she consumed, but I'm kinda irked that she got a paper coffee cup with plastic lid for her coffee. She totally could have used one of the mugs (they have over a dozen mugs). She probably thought I was really weird eating cooked spaghetti with raw large spinach leaves.

I know that farmer's markets sell local produce (I can now say that this spinach comes from around Lancaster, PA), and it's supposed to be, perhaps, organic, right? The spinach I had today was lighter in colour compared to Costco baby spinach. It was also a different texture and shape. The leaves were huge, and they were definitely not the small dark ovals I'm used to. A Google search of "spinach varieties" yields pictures of the spinach I think I have - thick savoy spinach. I guess I've just been living on baby spinach ever since we moved to the U.S.

OKAY! Taste! It was really crisp. The leaves were thick. It initially was pretty tasteless and reminded me of lettuce, but after a while, that characteristic stay-in-your-mouth spinach taste was really overwhelming. Pretty simple.

Spaghetti and Cheese

I like whole wheat pasta.

We don't have any whole wheat macaroni at home [and I don't think we have any macaroni], so I made some whole wheat sphaghetti with cheese sauce today.

I started looking through allrecipes.com to find a nice cheese sauce to make, since I've only made legitimate cheese sauce once before in my life [I think it was during Food Tech class? I'm not sure...]. I got sick of looking through recipes though, because the comments irked me and... I guess I just didn't feel like following instructions.

So here is my recipe, and it makes enough sauce for one pound of spaghetti, approximately. If you really like cheese, make more sauce!

1. 1 tbsp oil [highly unnecessary, actually, if you use normal-fat cheese].

2. 1 c fat-free milk

3. 1 c whole fat milk

4. 2 tbsp mustard

5. Old Bay seasoning, pepper, garlic, herbs, pepper.

6. 3 tbsp flour

7. Whatever filling you want, e.g. TVP, salmon chunks, ground-up flesh, lettuce etc.

8. 3 cups of shredded cheese. Or 4 cups. or 5. or 6. However much saturated fat you can handle.

Method:

1. Mix all the ingredients except for the flour in a saucepan. Put it on high heat until you start seeing bubbles.

2. On lowish heat, add flour, 1 tbsp at a time, and mix until there are no more lumps.

3. Turn off heat and mix in shredded cheese, one cup at a time. If you want, add in fillings.

4. Add in cooked pasta.

5. EAT WHEN HOT. When the cheese sauce gets cold, it tastes grainy and... cold... and not comforting at all. The image below is cold pasta because no one was ready for dinner at 5:30pm. After it was heated again, it was nice and gooey again. I know it doesn't look like the cliche "mac 'n' cheese" because I didn't use cheddar cheese and I used whole wheat spaghetti...

Random Blahs.

I'm actually going to go out to dinner later, but I'm not going to be back in time to update... so tomorrow I shall update about that. Instead, I'm just going to post a few random pictures.

Whole wheat spaghetti soup with onions and garlic and green peppers. And tomato, of course. And clumps of Boca burger. I have officially finished cooking Boca burgers and I will never consume another Boca burger in my life. I am completely sick of them. I like plain tofu better. Or even plain chickpeas.

:)

I found some Airheads candy in the food drawer. From 2007. Or maybe it was 2006. I don't really know. So I unwrapped them all, rolled them into a tyre shape [hey, it fits the theme of Cars] and threw it into the garden. Now I have a nice piece of space in the drawer for other food!

Yup - the sesame chocolate cookies I made a few days ago... This time I microwaved them for 40 seconds, flipped each over, and microwaved them for another 17 seconds. My sister actually liked them! She said that they looked and sort of tasted like fudge. Which is great, since fudge is very much appreciated in the world. Which is why everyone says, "Oh. Fudge!" when something goes wrong, because, by calling fudge into the world, all problems shall disappear.

Spinach Soup Spaghetti

My mum bought frozen spinach soup. It was literally a block of water with spinach pieces and cream and seasonings in it. How does one cook it? By heating it. In truth, I don't understand why one would buy frozen soup, but at least it didn't have random ingredients like those in plastic containers. So, I added some water to it to dilute it and made a thinner soup. I then added it to some slightly-undercooked-just-the-way-I-like-it whole wheat pasta :)

The spinachy taste was not prevalent at all, except in the spinach pieces itself. Actually, if you had told me "oh this is a vegetable soup", I would not have guessed spinach. Leek, maybe, or just plain old spring onion. Or chives. Not spinach, though. The soup was creamy-ish though, before I diluted it.

I think I like tomato based pasta, more, mainly out of habit, though.

Spaghetti and a Broken Mug.

I was just about to update when I decided that I would go get my Pink Panther mug and microwave some gingerbread batter. The mug somehow slipped as I was picking it up from inside another bowl, and fell about 10 cm smashing on to the countertop.

Apparently, there had been a lot of oil in the bowl, which inevitably coated my mug. I guess I didn't pick it up properly... I don't recall ever dropping a mug before this one.

So. Now, there are four major pieces left of my mug. You've all seen the mug before in previous posts; it's one of the regular vessels for anything microwaved. It's large enough to use as a bowl. I had breakfast using it today! :(

I ended up microwaving some gingerbread batter with a piece of it anyway. More about that later. I'm wondering what I'm supposed to do with this mug... though my mum is throwing it away tonight. :'(

On the other hand, my actual post today is about what I made for lunch. Spaghetti. Thin whole wheat spaghetti is really yummy, just plain [and a tad undercooked. I love undercooked spaghetti!!]. But, I made a sauce anyway...

Ingredients:

Drained spaghetti water

3-4 HEAPED tbsp tomato paste [PASTE. Not sauce.]

Dried oregano

2-4 tbsp white vinegar

1/4 of an onion

Two mashed up veggie burger patties [I got sick of Boca burgers so I'm trying to use up what I have left before I go to college]

NO SALT.

Garlic

Method: Stick everything in the pot [the water should still be around 100 degrees C] and let it simmer for a while. Then, pour it on the spaghetti, and consume.

YAY for basic! R.I.P. my mug.