Week 15 - Goat Cheese and Asparagus pasta

This photo was taken with my iphone. Just as we were about to eat. It was a yummy dinner!!!!!

I had never had goat cheese. I have a friend (Amy G.) who makes a goat cheese and caramelized onion pizza (but since I don't LOVE onions) I never bothered to try it out.

So when I was flipping through the everyday food cookbook and saw this recipe I figured I ought to give it a try. To me it looked a lot like mac'n'cheese and since my kids love mac'n'cheese I assumed they would at least try it. And they did (and 2 of them liked it!)

I made several adaptations (based on my inability to read a recipe, but I would keep them)

First, rinse asparagus and place on a rimmed baking sheet dotted with 2 tbs of butter. Salt and pepper them. Put in a 350 oven for 15 minutes.

In the meantime,cook the pasta.

Save 1 1/2 cups of the pasta water. Pour the hot pasta water into a saucepan with 5 oz of crumbled goat cheese and 3 TBS of butter. Stir until all the cheese and butter are melted. Then take a couple tablespoons of the sauce and a small bowl and add 2 tbs of cornstarch. Stir until smooth and then add back into the saucepan. Stir over medium heat until it is thickened.

Take the roasted asparagus and the pasta and the sauce and combine. Then I added 2-3 tbs of balsamic vinagraitte.

Serve warm!!!!!

(the original recipe only uses 1/2 cup of pasta water and then does not require any thickening -- also the original does not use the balsamic -- I suspect that the original way has much more of the "goat cheese" tanginess. But for us -- this watered down more flavorful way worked better. I even had a friend try it and she liked it, when I told her it was goat cheese she was shocked because she hates goat cheese and can usually pick it out of anydish!!!!)

Week 5 - Homemade Egg Noodles

I decided to try a new recipe from pioneerwomancooks.com and she recommended using homemade noodles for it and then she confided that the frozen bag of homemade noodles found at her grocery store in her small Oklahoma town. She often implies that if she has it there in Podunk, OK then we all will for sure have it wherever we may be.

I am here to tell you that despite being apart of the great metropolitan area of NYC the grocery stores here SUCK! There are no frozen homemade noodles to be found. The problem with grocery shopping here is that there are thousands of small stores -- each one with its own peculiarities and to find all the "normal" stuff I need it is not uncommon for me to have to frequent 4 grocery stores. Some of them even have names like "Super" in front of them. What they mean is "Super" expensive, super inconvenient, super likely to not have what I want.

So I had to make my own noodles. I followed the instructions on PW's website. Here is the link http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/05/homemade-pasta/

It was not so hard (6 eggs, 3 cups flour). But it was messy.

Lots of kneading and adding in a little flour.

I rolled it out (and now after they have been cooked) wished I had rolled it thinner, but I had already spent more time on this than I wanted. They were tasty.