A hot plate, some pasta, and leftovers

 

A pasta concoction--what ingredients can you identify?

As the name indicates, I started this blog to explore cooking with a hot plate instead of a stove because I now cook with a hot plate and a toaster oven—and I can’t use both simultaneously or I’ll blow the circuit breaker. I’ve gotten comfortable enough with my induction hot plate that the recipes I choose aren’t necessarily geared to that heat source. But today I want to talk about pasta and the hot plate.

Pasta is a great dish for the hot-plate cook—it offers an easy way to entertain, and in this day, when pasta is no longer red sauce over spaghetti, you can experiment all you want. Pasta is also a great way to use up leftovers. Whatever you choose to put in your sauce, pasta allows you to cook from scratch and to deal with individual foods in your final dish.

Most recipes call for cooking the pasta and, while it’s cooking, making the sauce on another burner. If you only have one hot plate, you obviously can’t do that. My trick is to cook the pasta, whatever shape and size you want, and rinse thoroughly in cold water when you get it to al dente stage. Remember, it will cook a bit more when you reheat in your sauce. Rinsing gets rid of most of that loose starch that makes cold pasta clump. Sure, it will chill while you make the sauce, but when the sauce is ready, you can dump the pasta into the skillet and reheat. Once, in the novel, Saving Irene, I had Henny James, the main character, pour a little olive oil on the pasta to keep it from clumping (I’ve been known to do that). I was roundly criticized by a reader who otherwise loved the book but claimed no self-respecting Italian would ever do that unless they were making aglio e olio (basically garlic and olive oil pasta).

An aside: I’ve discovered the advantages of serving pasta in soup plates. It makes everything so much easier. The pasta can’t slide off the plate. And I also always have parmesan or pecorino in my freezer, for spontaneous pasta meals. But back to leftovers.

One evening I was preparing to leave town the next day and wanted to use up what I could from the refrigerator. Prowling around, I found some good, thinly sliced ham left from a sandwich project, a stub of zucchini, and some asparagus that wouldn’t last much longer. I had spinach fettucine in the cupboard—just the right amount.

I sliced the zucchini thin, julienned the ham, and cut the asparagus into bite-size pieces. I used salt and pepper generously on the vegetables. Then a dollop of butter—maybe 1/8 cup--went into the skillet, and I sautéed the vegetables a bit longer than the ham—they needed to cook, and the ham was precooked and very thin. When the vegetables were cooked, I added the ham and well-drained pasta to the skillet, stirred, and heated on low until thoroughly warm. Just before dishing, I gently blended in a good-sized dollop (heaping tablespoon) of sour cream and some parmesan. Surprised myself both at how good it was and how much I ate.

Another suggestion: use canned salmon as your base. Add green peas (I love frozen petite peas), sliced green onions, chopped spinach. Season the vegetables and sauté in butter. Then sprinkle maybe 2 tsp. flour over them and stir to distribute evenly. Slowly make a sauce by pouring in white wine and half and half—maybe in equal parts. When the sauce is the right thickness (you be the judge), stir in some fresh or dried herbs—maybe a bit of basil or thyme or oregano. Stir in the cooked pasta and top with grated parmesan or pecorino for serving.

In general, spaghetti or angel hair, even fettucine, are best with light sauces. Richer, thicker sauces might call for tagliatelle or another type of pasta with lots of flat surface for the sauce to cling to. Tubular pastas like rotini, penne, or ziti are also good for heavy, meaty sauces—and for cold salads. Leftovers can make great pasta salads. Got some chicken from last night? Add some artichoke hearts, maybe quartered, some green onion, bell pepper if you like it (I don’t), sliced hearts of palm, cherry tomatoes halved, goat cheese--the possibilities are endless. Season with salt and pepper and herbs of your choice, and dress with a mixture of sour cream and mayonnaise or use as I sometimes do your favorite bottled vinaigrette (we like Newman’s Original Oil and Vinegar).

Go ahead, look in your refrigerator, and see what you find. Experiment and make a pasta dish for dinner tonight!

 

 

The Chicken Salad Controversy

 

Not my picture but the texture of the salad looks close.
Also, I liked the platter idea for serving.

When the weather starts to warm, Jordan shies away from “heavy” meals like pot roast and prefers salads. I’m with her a hundred percent, but there are two males in the family to feed. So we try for substantial salads—Cobb Salad (not Christian’s favorite), Big Mac Salad and Taco Salad (both Christian’s favorites). Don’t even mention Salade Niçoise because tuna is not on the list of recommended foods, even though I buy it by the case for Jordan and me.

So the other night I tried chicken salad. Christian and I have texture differences. He doesn’t like diced or even minced celery because it’s crisp where he doesn’t want crisp; I love celery in salads but hold the chopped nuts. To me, they are the wrong texture in the wrong place. So I put celery in the chicken salad, and he picked it out. And gave the salad only a B rating because it had no grapes and no nuts. The whole reason I liked the idea was that it had flavors different from the usual.

There is also the matter of how you like chicken cut for a salad—ruling out grilled chicken salad which is to me a whole different dish. Some liked it diced in nice-sized chunks (when I looked online for pictures of chicken salad, almost all showed chunks); some like it shredded, but you have to start with a warm piece of chicken to do that effectively. I used to whir chicken in the processor, so that it was really fine, and the salad came out with a creamy, almost spreadable texture. Now my choice is to mince it (partly so I don’t have to get out the processor). So here’s what I did:

Cilantro/Lime Chicken Salad

3 cups minced chicken (from a rotisserie chicken)

2/3 cup regular mayonnaise (light mayo or yogurt work but not as well)

1 tsp. garlic powder

½ tsp. each salt and pepper

2/3 cup minced celery (do string the celery before mincing)

¼ cup minced sweet onion

¼ cup green onion, chopped fine (you can use all sweet union or all green according to taste; I am on a sweet onion kick but wanted the color from green onion tops)

½ cup finely chopped cilantro (no need to stem it first)

Juice of one lime (more or less, according to taste—Jordan and I like more)

Optional: 1 sweet bell pepper, finely diced (if you cook with me much at all, you’ll learn I never use bell pepper: it doesn’t like me, and I don’t like it)

Mix it all together and chill before serving. Nice in an avocado half. Jordan offered “the boys” tortillas, so they could make it into a wrap, but I don’t think that idea went over well with either of them. A fruit salad might be a nice accompaniment. We had a traditional, tossed green salad. I’ll make this again and again this summer.

A note on stringing celery: somehow in raising Jordan, I never taught her to string celery. She used to stuff celery with cream cheese as an appetizer, and I’d get stuck with these strings. I have since tried to show her the technique. It’s like the time I watched Jamie struggling to peel a hard-boiled egg. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to peel them under running cold water?” I demanded. He said no. Now he knows. I’m quite sure my mom taught me those little tricks, along with a pinch of sugar in tomato sauces, but I never passed them on to my children.

A hodgepodge and an old recipe

 

I thought at my age I knew how to cook, but it amazes me how many things I discover daily that make kitchen life and meals better (I feel the same way about computers!). Jordan is the one who figured out my latest lesson: because of the compact space of my toaster oven, when baking or roasting I need to put things on a lower rack and adjust the temperature and time downward. She pointed this out after I overcooked some pigs in a blanket—edible but not as soft as they should be. Her theory: not as much room for air and heat to circulate.

My other lesson was about using leftovers. Last week I made the best sheet pan chicken—pardon me for bragging but it was really good. I mean, the chicken was fine, but the vegetables—carrot, potatoes, and sweet onion—were out of this world. The trick was lots of salt, an olive oil drizzle, and then place the chicken right on the vegetables so that the meat juices drip down and flavor the potato, carrot, and onion. (See the recipe here: Gourmet on a Hot Plate: Chicken thighs and sheet pan cooking) We ate all the chicken but there was a generous helping of vegetables left over—I ate it for a vegetarian lunch the next day.

A couple of days later, I started to scramble some eggs, using olive oil instead of butter (I’m avoiding dairy these days, but that’s another story!). Just in time I remembered there was a tiny two bit of vegetables and some of the juices in the fridge. I dumped it all into two eggs, soft scrambled them, and had a winner of a dinner. (Honest, I did not do that rhyme on purpose.)

I’ll make that chicken again, although I have a new idea. Much as we liked the sheet pan chicken, we also like an herbed butter spatchcocked chicken that I make. So why not put a spatchcocked fowl on the vegetables? Some of my family prefer white meat, which I often find too dry, so this would satisfy everyone.

And the whole thing reminded me of a recipe I’ve cooked over the years. A friend once dubbed it the $8,000 Leg of Lamb because that’s what she said she’d pay for the recipe. You can have it free. It uses the same principle of letting meat juices drip into vegetables. If you like lamb, you’ll love it; if you don’t, just pass on by.

$8,000 leg of lamb with vegetables

About 5 white-skinned potatoes, peeled and sliced

3 onions, thinly sliced (these days I buy only sweet onions)

3 tomatoes, thinly sliced

Salt and pepper

Dried thyme

Chopped garlic to taste

¾ c. white wine

⅓ c. vegetable oil

6-7-lb. leg of lamb, excess fat trimmed but bone in

Grease a 9x13 pan and layer the bottom with sliced potatoes. Add onions and then tomatoes. Sprinkle each layer with salt, pepper, dried thyme, and a little chopped garlic. Pour white wine and vegetable oil over the vegetables. Cover pan with a cake or oven rack.

Season lamb to taste with salt and pepper and set it on the cake rack. Roast at 400° until meat thermometer registers 145° (about 75 minutes—the lamb will be medium rare; roast longer for better done, but don’t overdo it!). Turn the lamb every 20 minutes or so and baste with liquids from the vegetables. Remove from oven and let it collect itself before carving.