Lemon Herb Pasta

I really loved Baked Lemon Pasta but it just took too long to make for lunch.  So I wanted to make something similar but be quick to make.  I wish I had more fresh herbs to toss in.  I had  just a little leftover from making Pasta with Fresh Herbs.  I would recommend putting in more basil in this pasta.  I had bought some whole wheat rigatoni a while ago that I wanted to try out and I thought this would be a great dish for it.  I was low on sour cream so I mixed in some yogurt but if you have 1 cup of sour cream I would recommend using that.

Pasta with Tomato Cream Sauce Revisited

Recently I made Pasta with Tomato Cream Sauce again.  This time I increased the garlic and reduced the tomato sauce.  I didn't have any Parmesan so I left that out and I used Rotini instead of Fettuccine.  It tasted great the first time I made it but this time it was even better!!!  My son loved it and calls it "Bahut Zyada Yummy Pasta" :).  You should definitely give this a try.  It doesn't take a long time to make.  The sauce is enough for 4 cups of Rotini pasta.  I've updated the post to reflect the changes I made this time.

Easy Thin Crust Pizza

When my brother and I were in public school we always came home to eat lunch.  Once in awhile my mom would make pizza.  When we were walking in the hallway to our apartment we could smell the pizza...hmmmm...that was my favorite lunch.  I've always heard that pizza is so easy to make and I've been wanting to give it a try.  This was not my first try.  I tried a recipe with proofing the yeast..my dough didn't rise and it turned out very dense.  This was not my first bad experience with yeast.  I thought maybe I should just give up on yeast and search for a yeastless recipe.  I found one and that turned out very dense and was not good.  After searching the web I decided I should check out Smitten Kitchen.  She always has great recipes.  I found this recipe and it turned out great.  There is no proofing of the yeast.  Just mix it all together!!!!  This makes a thin crust pizza.  I love thin crust but the problem is I end up eating way to much.  You can double the recipe (I haven't had the chance to try that).  (UPDATE: I tried to double this recipe and it didn't turn out well)  I've made this twice.  Once with all all-purpose flour and the next time I replaced 1/2 cup with whole wheat flour.  I preferred the one with whole wheat.  I didn't really make any changes to this recipe.  The original uses all-purpose but says you can replace up to half with whole wheat.

When I made this my dough didn't double in size and I was getting all upset with myself knowing I screwed up somewhere.  But I continued on and made the pizza.  I was so surprised how good it turned out!  I put olives on half the pizza because my son loves olives...I don't.  He cannot understand why I don't like olives.

Mushroom Risotto

We really enjoyed the Spring Green Risotto I made a little while ago.  I had some arborio rice left and thought I would try to make a mushroom risotto.  I used the Porcini and Cremini Mushroom Orzo "Risotto" as a guideline.  It turned out really well and my 1 year old son loved it!  The next day it held up much better than the Spring Green Risotto.  I didn't put any cream cheese in it which helped it to not turn into a big pile of mush the next day.  I'm looking forward to trying more risotto recipes but it is something I wouldn't make regularly since it has a lot of starch.

Spring Green Risotto

I have eaten Risotto twice.  Once it was so delicious.  The other time it was extremely bland.  I have always been daunted with the idea of making Risotto.  I've  heard it is very time consuming.  Lately I've been looking at a few Risotto recipes and decided I would like to give it a try.  After reading a few recipes I realized compared to Indian cooking it really wasn't that time consuming.  The other thing I discovered was dry white wine is always added to Risotto.  So if you ever eat Risotto outside check if there is any alcohol in it.  Instead of wine I just used water.  I settled on this Risotto recipe because I had some asparagus in the fridge and needed to cook it before it went bad.  My changes to this recipe was mainly to reduce the fat but replacing the butter with olive oil.  I also used light cream cheese instead of mascarpone and significantly reduced the Parmesan cheese.  Even before adding all the cheese this was very tasty.  I also added garlic.  I don't think I cook anything without garlic.  I also used vegetable broth instead of chicken broth.  I reduced the lemon zest and lemon juice as well.

Pasta with Tomato Cream Sauce

I love pasta and I love it even more when it is so simple to make.  I really enjoyed this dish but next time I will use a different pasta than fettuccine.  It's not one of my favorites.  When making this make sure you add the fresh basil because that is what really makes this dish.  My main change to this recipe was to replace the heavy cream with sour cream. I always use low fat.  I love this substitution for heavy cream in pasta. 

 

Pasta with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce

I am really enjoying all these pasta dishes from The Pioneer Woman.  I always thought making pasta sauces from scratch would be so time consuming but I was wrong.  This is a really easy pasta to make.  I liked it like this but next time I think i'm going to try to make it spicy.  It came together very quickly.  The original recipe said to roast your own peppers but I don't have that kind of time so I bought a couple of jars of roasted peppers.  I substituted low fat sour cream for the heavy cream.  This would taste even better with the heavy cream but I'll pass on all that fat.  My mom had this pasta.  She really liked it and she isn't a big fan of pasta.

Porcini and Cremini Mushroom Orzo "Risotto"

I have always wanted to try to make risotto but have always been so scared too.  It seemed like way too much work.  The first time I had it was at 3 Guys and a Stove in Collingwood, ON.  I had the mushroom risotto and it was amazing.  I loved that restaurant.  Everything I had there was so good and can't wait to go there again.  The second time I had risotto was at a big fancy restaurant and it was horrible.  So bland...it reminded me of gulati and it made gulati taste amazing.  (Gulati is something my mom would make if someone had diarrhea.  You cook basmati rice in a bunch of water and keep cooking until it's mush and then add some butter, salt and pepper).  After having that bland risotto I thought  I could cook better than this.  I found this recipe at Cookin' Canuck.  It looked so simple.  It wasn't traditional risotto but I wanted to give it a try.  The first time I made it it was a little bland for us so the next time I increased the onions, garlic and porcini mushrooms.  I only like to use whole wheat pasta so it took some searching to find whole wheat orzo and luckily at the same store I found porcini mushrooms.  Next time I would like to try it with arborio rice.  My four year old made a face as soon as he tried it since he doesn't like mushrooms but my 1 year old gobbled it up!

Baked Lemon Pasta

This is another simple pasta dish. It's very refreshing and I love the use of sour cream instead of heavy cream. It is such a nice change from the tomato based sauces.  If you would like just a hint of lemon add less.  If you would like a more powerful zing add the entire half a lemon.

My main change was to replace the butter with oil and use low fat sour cream.  I used Farro Fusilli but you can use whatever pasta you have on hand.

Sundried Tomato Pasta Salad

Recently we had a small gathering catered by Simply Halal.  The food was amazing.  The pasta in particular was so good.  We ate it for the following 2 days and I didn't get bored of it.  I realized how I suck at making pasta.  For years I've been making my mom's pasta sauce and I've gotten bored of it.  Lately I have been looking at The Pioneer Woman blog.  I've already tried a few recipes with great success.  So I started to take a look at her pasta recipes.  Why does she use so much cream and butter?????  I'm not trying to put on 20 pounds.  If I used that much fat my cooking would improve no doubt...but I have modified her recipes to reduce the fat with good results so I have hope for her pasta dishes too.  This recipe had no cream or butter!! Yeah!!! But it had a ton of parmesan cheese which I significantly reduced. It also used 1 cup of extra-virgin olive oil. There was no way I could use 1 cup of oil!!!  I don't think I use 1 cup of oil to make a huge pot of haleem..how could I use that much oil for a pasta salad!!  So I reduced it by half and was so glad I did.  I think it would have been way to greasy if I hadn't.  Also I don't like olives so I left those out and after making this recipe I realized I don't like cherry tomatoes either so next time I'm gonna leave those out too.  My 4 year old son loved this pasta and for him I added a bunch of olives..I like to say he is eating olives with a little bit of pasta because he likes A LOT of olives.

This recipe also has red wine vinegar.  I looked up on SunniPath if it was permissable to use vinegars that are alcohol based and it was okay.  I had bought the red wine vinegar but I was still feeling nervous about using something that had the word 'wine' in it.  So I looked it up again to ease my conscious.

This recipe was good hot or cold and I'm definitely going to make it again.  I used my immersion blender to blend all the ingredients which wasn't a very good idea because there wasn't a lot of space.  A blender would be a better way to go but I hate using the blender.  It's too noisy and would wake a napping 1 year old baby so I avoid using it.

Pasta with Fresh Herbs

I've been looking for a pasta recipe with a fresh herb and olive oil dressing.  This is an adaption of Fettuccine with Fresh Herbs from Joy of Cooking.  It was really good.  I didn't use Fettuccine because the recipes calls for 1 pound of fettuccine.  I was only making 1/4 of the recipe.  How do I measure 1/4 pound of fettuccine?  I was too lazy to look it up and more importantly I don't have fettuccine.  I know 4 cups of dried pasta is about 1 pound of pasta.  So I used a heaping cup of bowtie pasta.  I think I could have used 1 1/2 cups of bowtie pasta.  My changes were to add a minced garlic clove. I also significantly reduced the Parmesan cheese and used a little less basil.  Next time I'm going to try to make it without the cheese to eliminate a significant amount of the fat from this recipe.