Good & Bad: Pumpkin Cheddar Mac & Cheese vs. Pasta Presto's Red & Yellow Cherry Tomato Saute

I know I've mentioned this before, but I am a huge pastaholic. I attribute it partially to growing up in a very Italian part of Connecticut, which to most parts of the country probably sounds a bit strange (aren't we more known for our Puritan rudeness?). Waterbury, CT is the place I refer to; I grew up in one of its suburbs, and thus grew up in a place where even chain restuarants like Olive Garden and Bertucci's have to step up their game if they want to survive. Let me tell you: the SF Bay Area is woefully lacking in real, GOOD Italian food. The two places I've found are a walk-in-and-order place, and a super-expensive place. No middle ground.

So today's post shall deal with that most wondrous of comfort foods: pasta.

Pumpkin Cheddar Mac & Cheese

Hari, of course, was the one to find this recipe; really, this blog probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for Hari. I am not the biggest fan of pumpkin OR mac & cheese, but this still intrigued me. After all, there's a truly odd list of ingredients in there. Whole wheat pasta! Honey! Pumpkin puree! Allspice! It's like someone tried to turn pumpkin pie into mac & cheese.

Pasta Presto's Red & Yellow Cherry Tomato Saute

I stumbled upon this cute little recipe book when exploring Ithaca, NY's used bookstore on the Commons. It had been marked down from $10 to a mere dollar, so of course, as a pasta lover, I had to snatch it up. It is a series of sauces that you can quickly make and serve over pasta. I've made quite a few of them, including converting some of the meat ones to vegetarian. This one recipe, though, I make often when the summer bumpercrop of cherry tomatoes shows up.

Since this is an older recipe book when the internet was barely a thing, I'll give a quick list of the contents, but not the full recipe for copyright reasons:

Olive Oil
Garlic Cloves, chopped
Red & Yellow cherry tomatoes
Fresh Parsley (I use dried and it's fine)
Fresh Chives (I don't use and it's fine

Pumpkin Cheddar Mac & Cheese vs. Pasta Presto's Red & Yellow Cherry Tomato Saute: GO!


(Fun Fact: I made this a year ago.)


(Fun Fact: This may not be the recipe I think it is, but it looks close enough.)

So as I mentioned, I'm not a big fan of pumpkin or mac & cheese. Furthermore, as I recall, I had to use mozarrella or something like that since I didn't have cheddar. Also pretty sure I had to sub the ground mustard for something else. Basically, the test could very well be my fault. But? It tasted like pumpkin to me. Overwhelmingly so; I didn't taste any of the spice or the cheese, just the faint sweetness of pureed pumpkin. Now, if you love pumpkin, that means this recipe will probably work out fantastically for you! But if I were to make it again, I'd half the amount of pumpkin. Also probably use cheddar instead of mozarrella but that's a whole different story.

As for the tomato saute? I recently discovered that I love cooked cherry tomatoes, especially if they are cooked whole. Then you bite into them and they release hot delicious juice into your mouth... I don't get why I didn't discover the wonders of these guys until... This year, maybe last? So this recipe, which depends entirely on the quality of your tomatoes, gives them a chance to shine. The spices don't matter much here; I've substituted basil, I've not used them at all, etc. What matters is that you use top-quality, fresh cherry tomatoes, or this will be a failure. Use the best olive oil you have as well. A recipe with this few ingredients relies on all of them being top-notch.

So for those of you who live in places with legitimate growth seasons (or really just real seasons), you're going to want to make this during the height of summer. For those of us in places with tomatoes year-round, so long as the crop is good, you can make it.

For what it's worth, I think the pumpkin mac & cheese would pair easily with gluten-free pasta, since most of the flavour is in the sauce. By contrast, you need to either really love the taste of gluten-free pasta or just have some godly stuff for the tomato saute, since that sauce is much lighter.

Pumpkin Cheddar Mac & Cheese: 7/10 (again: everything went fine, just not my cup of tea*)
Pasta Presto's Red & Yellow Cherry Tomato Saute: 10/10

Tschuess!

* This is my cup of tea:

Butterscotch Sauce

So I'm not the biggest fan of alcohol. I don't like the taste, alcoholism runs in my family and I've had a couple of bad experience. But one thing I have always liked is some hot cocoa with butterscotch schnapps.

One day I was contemplating become a teatotaler, and realized that would mean no butterscotch schnapps. So I searched the internet...

Butterscotch Sauce.

And found this.

"Butterscotch is a thing?" I thought. "Like, a legit thing, not just a flavour?"



Indeed it is!

So. This butterscotch recipe is very easy to follow, includes pictures that are actually HELPFUL, and furthermore, is from what I can understand the original way to make butterscotch. It tastes just like the flavouring from the schnapps, and FAR better than your standard butterscotch ice cream topping from the store. I probably could have drank the whole bowl of it right then and there.

I will note, however, that I'm not sure how to keep it. I put in the fridge and that caused it to become rock solid. I reheat it when I need to use it, but then the sugar starts to caramelize further, and it gains a somewhat granular texture, even if the flavour is still okay. So I think a sealed, heatproof jar at room temperature may be your best bet.

Oh, and it tastes FANTASTIC in hot cocoa and ice cream.

10/10. Seriously. It's awesome.

Tschuess.

Spicy Vietnamese Lemongrass Tofu Adapation

So I had plans today. Plans to wash the towels and laundry, scrub the stove, do yoga. PLANS.

Then my stomach suddenly freaked out, shortly followed by my head. These plans are being postponed, and replaced with a post and some videogames.

Spicy Vietnamese Lemongrass Tofu Adapation

I'm calling this an adaptation rather than the actual recipe, because I ended up making so many substitutions that I'm pretty sure this dish is nothing like the original recipe. Here is the original recipe. Now, for what I ended up doing (I'm converting it directly from their recipe, because I can't remember how much exactly I used):

2tbsp Black Bean Sauce
About 1tbsp fresh ginger root
2tbsp curry powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2tbsps plus 1/2 teaspoon sugar
1 pound tofu
1tbsp soy sauce
2tbsp olive oil
3tbsp water
3tbsp peanut oil
1 small onion
1tbsp chili paste, or to taste
Peppers, Tomatoes, or whatever vegetables you like
Brown Rice

From there, I think I recall screwing up royally. First off, I'm not sure I actually MARINATED the tofu in soy sauce like the recipe calls for. I do remember I pressed it to get the water out of it, because tofu is near-impossible to stirfry unless you do so. Then I coated the tofu with the black bean sauce, ginger, curry powder, salt, and 1/2 teaspoon sugar.

Then when making the caramelized sugar, I failed to add the extra water, and the caramel solidified in its container. That was interesting. But then I stirfried everything else and let it simmer and got:



A food that won't photograph well.

But taste-wise? It was pretty amazing. All of my haphazard substitutions somehow blended together very well, and forgetting the lemongrass did nothing noticeable to the flavour. It had a good kick to it, though it wasn't as sweet as you may expect from the caramel, likely because I messed up making it.

Of course, I will need to make this again without substituting half of the recipe, but the fact that I did and it still tasted great? Proves that either I know how flavours work better than I realize, or that the recipe has a solid foundation.

8.5/10 either way. I even enjoyed the leftovers.

Until next time...

Tschuess.

Pasta with Tempeh and Roasted Garlic Sauce

It's a warm day today -- and it has my apartment humid and kind of unpleasant. It probably doesn't help that I just deep cleaned the bathroom, which leaves me wanting to just lay around and be like "See, I did work, I can play Sims the rest of the afternoon right?"

The answer is no.

Pasta with Tempeh and Roasted Garlic Sauce

So this is a bit awkward. I've been meaning to put this recipe up for ages, and now that I'm finally getting to it... the blog is gone :(. So you all can have SOMETHING to check out, I quickly found this recipe which looks very similar... Once I got to the recipe. However, the original recipe was based mostly on just tempeh, tomatoes, and roasted garlic, without the extra veggies.



It also looks pretty unflattering when paired with green pasta.

It's been a while since I made this recipe, but I still recall that I found it kind of meh, at most. It was a bit watery, hence why it doesn't seem to be covering the pasta very well at all, but I've found that true of many homemade sauces. I actually cut back on the amount of tomato used, so perhaps it was partially my fault; the tomatoes I had were huge and I didn't think I needed both of them.

The tempeh itself still retains a lot of the original flavouring that I think is from preservatives or SOMETHING. Basically, it just didn't seem to cook all that well in the sauce. If I recall, the leftovers that I microwaved with some pasta fared a bit better than fresh, which really is just bizarre.

So overall, I think adding some tomato paste could help give the sauce some body, while perhaps cooking the tempeh then adding it to the sauce would help with the flavour. I'm noticing that the recipe I linked as a substitute has you BOIL the tempeh which strikes me as a bit "Huh?". I don't know how the texture of that would be.

Overall rating? 5/10. It wasn't that impressive but it wasn't awful either.

Bonus Rating! The spinach noodles you see up there are Garden Time Fancy Spinach Ribbons, which is really just a ridiculously pretentious name for cut wide spaghetti. They brag about their pasta on the bag, and it's expensive stuff.

It also doesn't taste any better than Target brand. Raw it has a odd texture but I can taste the spinach, but once cooked? Pretty bland flavouring. I'm pretty neutral on recommending it, really. I guess that's another 5/10? 6/10? Something around there.

Until next time...

Tschuess.