Recipe: Noodles Two Ways

[triedunture]

Got a box of bowtie pasta ($1.39 at Foodtown)? Then you've got at least 4 meals, served 2 ways.

The first is an old family recipe. A good slice of my family pie is Slovak, and we love our cabbage. So what if it smells funny when you cook it? It is sooooo cheap.

So here's what you do:
Boil some pasta like normal.
Cut up a head of cabbage.
Throw it in a pot with a stick of butter. (Half a stick for a small head.)
Sautee over low, low heat until no longer green. This is nature's way of letting you know there is no longer any nutritional value left.

See this here?




Still too green. Depending on the amount of cabbage, this could take as much as an hour. Throw in some pepper if you want, but honestly, that would just fuck with the buttery goodness.

And we don't want that. DO WE?




Serve tossed with the bowties. Use a hunk of bread to sop up any butter that tries to escape. Mmmm, Slovakian ancestors. There's a reason we as a people don't have very good life expectancies.

A quick note on Slovakian butter usage:
There is a stage of butter between clarified (or "drawn butter," the kind they serve with lobster) and burned. It's a magical stage called "browned butter." It looks like small brown flecks, almost like cinnamon, has appeared in the butter. This. Is. Delicious. It gives the butter a robust, nutty flavor as opposed to the sweetness of clarified butter or the scorched taste of burned butter. If you are so poor you can't afford the cabbage, just toss the noodles in browned butter. Just heat the butter gently over low, low heat with plenty of stirring for as long as it takes. This is something you see a lot in Amish cooking too.


Now onto recipe numero dos. This is more healthy and just as simple.

You gots to:
Make the pasta like normal.
Sautee a bag of baby spinach in a little oil over low heat. (The leaves will wilt and turn a dark green after a few minutes as the spinach cooks down. That's good!)
Chop up some of the 10,000 pounds of tomato you stupidly bought at the farmer's market because "it was such a good deal."
Shred a little...okay, a LOT of romano cheese.
Toss the whole fuckin' thing together.




Ohhh yeah. That's the stuff.

With a little creative stretching, that one box of pasta can turn into 2 lunches and 2 dinners. This is good if you're poor and in love with carbo-loading for quick bursts of energy.

Now I have to use the rest of these tomatoes before they go bad. I've already eaten more cheese and tommy-toe toasties than I can possibly handle; look out for my huge batch o' fresh salsa next, I guess?