Dinner

I did a mangled recipe for dinner tonight. Back in San Francisco, my roommate Danielle made a pasta dish with smoked oysters that was delish. I've tried to make it a couple times and never come anywhere close, so tonight I browsed for smoked oyster pasta recipes, then took the bits of recipes I a) liked and b) had the ingredients for. (And b was sadly more important than a.)

(Of minor note--I didn't really cook much back in SF, so it's possible that the dish was incredibly good just because real food always tasted amazing. When you live on bagels and microwave pizza, sometimes all food really needs to be is warm.)

So my recipe: I preheated a frying pan with a generous dollop of olive oil in it over medium low, while I diced an onion. A small one, because the big one was half rotten *sigh*. Threw the onion in the pan, and while it started cooking, pressed two garlic cloves through the recently re-discovered garlic press, which probably only has a brief window of use before it gets buried in the drawer again, and added them. Took a handful of sun dried tomatoes and chopped them up, although not too fine, mostly because they kept sticking to the knife, then tossed them in the pan. Finally chopped up a tin of smoked oysters--mashed might be a better word for it--and added it. Stirred a few times.

Then--and this was probably key--I realized that I'd forgotten to start my water for the pasta. Ah, how sad. I turned the heat a little lower on the pan of "sauce", and turned the water on. Except for some reason I only turned the water on to medium. Another 20 minutes later and I realized my water still wasn't boiling. About 40 minutes after I started cooking, the water finally boiled and I could cook the pasta.

The reason all that is important is that my "sauce" cooked slowly for a long time over a really low heat. And it was YUM. Funnily enough, though, not so much on the pasta, although I was certainly happy to eat it. But I was too hungry to wait, so kept taking little bits of the oyster/onion/garlic/tomato mash and spreading it on bread, and it was fantastic. Definitely one of the better mangled recipes I've done recently. It didn't even occur to me to take a picture, but since it was really one of the ugliest foods I've seen, that's probably not a problem.

(Another minor note: the kid wouldn't even taste it. I allowed this, because I didn't really mind if I didn't have to share. He got to have some bottled sauce over spaghetti instead.)