Cooking With Us - e39 - Ghetto Pasta Puttanesca

Ciao! Benvenuto!

This time on 'Cooking with Us' I had a request from my hubby, Theron, to make
pasta!  He was already on his way home from work when I started,
so I just worked with ingredients I found around the house.

What I wound up with was a rather good, simple puttanesca sauce,
moist chicken, and, well, pasta from a box!

Please watch full res and full screen.

Like the font I chose for this one? ;)
Orelay, vatos!

This is really good, as you can probably tell from the inserted image above!
Now, on with the photo-recipe post!

This will be your finished product!
(And was what Theron's looked like before he covered it with cheddar cheese. Oh the humanity!)

Honestly, adding cheese didn't ruin it, it just made it creamier.
That's fine, but I prefer to let the ingredients speak for themselves.

This time, 'Cooking with Us' pretty much just meant cooking with me,

as Theron was on his way home from work when I started.

No lies, I had a little fun with effects on this episode - including a silly title tool!

But it's true - as I used all canned/jarred/frozen/boxed ingredients, this is a ghetto pasta puttanesca! :)

Glow filter :P
And my ingredients: Two cans of unsalted, diced tomatoes, two cans of mushrooms,
some capers, some pitted black olives, and of course, our pasta.

The first thing I did was to pour the diced tomatoes into a pan and start cooking it on low.

Then I added both cans of mushrooms (after draining the juice from the cans).

The capers (I used almost all of these) and just a little of their juice (be careful!)
which will add all the salt you need for your sauce.

At first I thought this didn't look like enough olives,

but it was what was left in the fridge, and wound up being perfect.

Chop up your olives so they are in small pieces!

Everything from the jars is added in and cooking.
Doesn't that look beautiful already? And delicious!

I added a little bit of garlic powder for flavoring.
Remember: A little garlic powder goes a long way!

I also added dry cilantro leaves, as we had no fresh parsley or cilantro.
I actually put in quite a bit of this, and it really bestowed a complexity to the sauce, to my surprise.

You can see the cilantro floating on top before I mixed it in ;)

For some reason I wanted the sauce to be a bit sweeter this go-round,
so I added some tomato paste.

In the video I called this a teaspoon - woops!
I actually added two heaping tablespoons of tomato paste to the sauce :)
PS: Isn't that flare on the spoon awesome?

I also defrosted some chicken, chopped it into chunks, and put it into a pan
with cooking spray which my husband had gotten ready for me.

Say Hi to Theron :)

Say Hi to Brigly!
Don't worry, I gave him some cheese ^^

Meanwhile, we poured approximately 16 cups of water into a pot...
Basically just lots of water... and waited for it to boil.

So I decided to play with my camera. The ring in the shadow is where an external mic would go.
Or it could be your shadow-monocle.
Or a sight..
Whatever - have fun with it! ;D

Once our water was boiling, it was time to add in the spaghetti.

For 'al dente' it said cook nine minutes.

We cooked it for eight minutes, but I think even less would have been fine.
And yes, in the video I said "number" instead of "hashtag".
Ah, the days of IRC and showing my age ;)

We drained our pasta but didn't rinse it... mainly because I forgot to do that part ;)

Then Theron and I loaded up our plates with spaghetti,
awesomely juicy chicken, and puttanesca sauce!
Isn't that steam beautiful?

Then, as usual, it was time for the taste test.
(Behind Theron is the last of our Tang.)

"I say make it, because I'm hungry. But make the sauce, because it's really good.
The rest is just cheese and pasta."
(He added heaps of cheddar to his, remember?)

My turn!

"If you like pasta, this is an awesome sauce.
Or just, you know, put it over chicken!
Because the sauce is good, and the chicken is good."
 True words.

I closed this podcast by sharing the info that I got my necklace with mi madre in Puerto Rico.
That was what?
Seven or eight years ago now?

(From a guy staining sea glass and expertly twisting metal at the
Bacardi factory while we were all waiting out a rain storm!)

Time to say bye bye (for now) to Mr. Brigly-Bear.

And linger on my awesome photo one more time.

Final Thoughts:
If you find yourself in a lurch for dinner, and are too lazy/have no time to run to the store,
and if you happen to have these ingredients on hand,
you have the opportunity to make a delish dinner!
(I ate this three nights in a row, thanks to leftovers!)

Arrivederci!!
-Val!

Recipe:

- 2 cans no-salt-added diced tomatoes

- 2 cans of your fave mushrooms, drained

- a fair amount of capers, with just a little of their juice

- about 1.5 handfuls of black olives, pitted and diced

- 2 heaping tablespoons of organic tomato paste

- a fair amount of dry cilantro

- a smidgen of garlic powder

Let this cook on medium-low heat for quite a while, till everything seems cooked decently and the flavors become harmonious :)

- Chicken

 I cooked the chicken in a separate pan with PAM cooking spray, because I wasn't sure how we'd want to eat the left overs.  This worked out great, as the chicken retained it's own juicy flavor.

-Cheese is an option if you want to put it on top ;)

Cook spaghetti however you normally do :)
Our 'veggie' spaghetti was unimpressive and just tasted like bland noodles. Shrugs.

Transcript:

Hi guys!

Welcome to KumoCafe's Cooking With Us...

Apparently Theron's had a really tiring day at work and he requested pasta, so I'm gonna make a kind of ghetto version of Pasta Puttanesca.

So I've got some olives that I'm gonna chop up, uh, some capers, two non-salted diced tomatoes because obviously...
salty enough.

And some mushrooms...

I'm also gonna grill up some, some chicken, so.

Now I'm gonna put the mushrooms in 'cause they can cook for however long we need them to.

Probably about that much capers and a little bit of sauce.

This is how many black olives I'm gonna use.

Which in reality, this should be more than enough.

This is how this looks right now, and actually it tastes really good.

We're gonna let that cook...

I'm gonna add a little bit of garlic powder to it.

But just a little bit, because a little goes a long way.

Yep.

You wanna taste this?

Mm. That's gonna go good with... anything we put it on.

Say Hi!

Hi.

I'm excited about this pasta because it's supposedly made out of...

Tomatoes and carrots.

Now I'm gonna get out my chicken and chop it into... chunks.

Mrow.

If you know the recipe for Puttanesca, you know it calls for flat leaf parsley...

Last time we used cilantro because that's what we had...
Well this time we don't even have that so I'm gonna put some of this in here.

Which is just dry cilantro.

And I'm gonna put my chicken into this skillet over here which Theron put PAM in for me.

Water...

So, 16 cups of water...

So since I can't leave well enough alone right now, and I'm literally waiting for water to boil, I'm gonna add a teaspoon of organic tomato paste to our sauce, cause I want to make it a little bit sweeter.

Hm.. maybe a little bit more than a teaspoon.

Ok, this much more.

Puppy, puppy, puppy....

Brigly, Brigly, Brigly...

Daddy has cheese and he's not sharing it.

Good boy.

My monocle.

This is my monocle.

Now we're putting our 'veggie pasta' into our boiling water... which we will do, for nine minutes.

Is that how you make the spaghetti?

That's how you make the al dente.

Number no filter.

It's a hot pasta.

It's still got wheat and stuff in it...

It's not - it can't - it's not all veggies, you know.

That's very moist white chicken.

That steam, that's crazy.

Cheddar?

Sprinkle sprinkle.

Does it need cheese? No.
Does it want cheese? Yes.

Ok, I wanted to see if veggie pasta tasted any different than normal pasta, and it does not.

Just tastes like noodles.

The sauce is really good...

The tomatoes are a nice touch.

The rest is cheese and spaghetti.

Well yeah.

I'd make it cause I'm hungry.

But, the sauce is good, and  that's the main thing.

The sauce is really good.

Yes the sauce turned out good, and you're right, the rest really is just pasta.

But, the sauce is good and the chicken's good...
And if you like pasta, this is a really good sauce!

So... make the sauce.
Make the sauce.
And don't worry about the pasta.

Just put it over chicken.
Make the -
Mhm.

Right?
yeah.

Thanks for joining us on KumoCafe's Cooking With Us...

I got this with my mom in Puerto Rico...

We'll see ya next time!

Bye!

Say bye.

Brigly bear, say bye.

Bye-bye!