pasta for two

Last night I cooked pasta. I made the sauce, I boiled the pasta then mixed it. Mr Grey got home shortly thereafter and we ate.

This morning I realised that it was the first time since Mr Grey and I got married that I made pasta all by myself.

See, I cook all manner of other dishes by myself. But for some reason, in our household, pasta has always been two person job. Mr Grey boils the noodles; my job is usually the sauce. I love those moments.

I'm usually over at the stove happily stirring sauce while he's at the other corner of the kitchen boiling up the noodles at his induction cooker. We chat and buzz around each other calling out for utensils, snacking on the cheese and generally just being together. Then there always comes the climactic moment when we drain the pasta together - I hold the sieve - and it finally comes together with the sauce in the pot. Then, in a hurry, the table is set and we eat.

I can make pasta by myself. I used to when I lived alone.

Next week, I'm going to be really Busy. Busy with caps and possibly blinking lights. I won't have a whole lot of time to sit down and mull. So before I get Busy, I just wanted to note down here that one of the things in life I'm hugely, enormously grateful for is Mr Grey. I'm so glad I get to hang out with him, wake up next to him and cook with him.

I can cook pasta alone. But cooking pasta with Mr Grey is just so much better.

The One: Roasted vegetables and Chicken stock

Sometimes, in fumbling around cooking and trying out different things, you stumble across a recipe that turns out - strangely and incomprehensibly - perfect. It is The One. The one that you have subconsciously been looking for. In fact, all the other recipes you tried were but pale shadows of the One.

In the last few months, I bookmarked two separate recipes from two different blogs and only got around to trying them out recently. One was from The Wednesday Chef, titled "The Best Roasted Vegetables Ever". The other was from Smitten Kitchen - "Perfect Uncluttered Chicken Stock".  Really, the blog titles should have given it away; they both turned out to be The One in each of their categories. 

One.

The best roasted vegetables ever.

They were! And so easy too - the prep takes hardly 20 minutes and then you can pop them into the oven and walk away for a full hour. I used to make my roasted veg exactly like how Luisa Weiss described her former roasted veg style - chop the veg into small chunks, mess about with oil and toss it into the oven with the heat turned up high. This one is different. For this one, you take out your baking dish and pile the veg in willy-nilly. In layers. All messy-like. Then it goes into the oven for a long long time on slooow heat. The onions caramelize, the potatoes turn soft and sweet and the eggplant soaks up all the tomato juice and becomes this mess of flavour. 

Roasted Vegetables 
Serves 3-4 (?) as a side dish

1 medium onion
1 eggplant
1 small potato
5 small tomatoes
1 red or yellow pepper

A handful of mushrooms

2 cloves of garlic
Salt and pepper to taste
Dried herbs (sage, thyme, rosemary, wild fennel are all good choices - either individually or combined in some form)
5 to 6 tablespoons of olive oil, plus more to taste

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius. Quarter and slice the onion thinly. Dice all the vegetables into pieces that are approximately the same size (no larger than 1/2 inch). Pile the vegetables into a baking dish so that the vegetables lie a few inches thick. Season with salt, pepper and herbs to taste and then pour the olive oil over the vegetables. Mix thoroughly but gently - you don't want to destroy the tomatoes before the dish goes into the oven. Now check the vegetables to make sure they are well-coated and glistening with oil. If need be, add more oil.

2. Put the dish in the oven and cook for 45 minutes to an hour. Halfway through the cooking process, remove the dish from the oven and very gently stir the vegetables so that the ones at the bottom come to the top. Towards the end of the cooking process, stir a second time. Remove from the oven and let cool slightly. Check for seasoning and serve.

Note: The original recipe had both zucchini and carrots. I omitted them because I don't like zucchini... actually I also don't really like carrots. I subbed in some mushrooms instead. I don't know how many people this recipe would feed - I made it for two and had leftovers so theoretically, it could feed up to 4 as a side dish?

Also, the leftovers are delicious. 

Two.

Deb Perelman calls it "Perfect, uncluttered chicken stock". 

I call it the easiest,  most chicken-y chicken stock - ever. Really really. And I've made my fair share of chicken stock. Including the kind that require you to stand at the stove skimming the scum off for the first hour(I really hate those).  And yet, after all that work, there would be this water-y, slightly bland tasting stock. I dutifully used those but deep inside, I always felt let down. Plus it was so much work! All the faffing about with carrots and celery. 

Until yesterday. Friends, we have a winner. This is The One. The stock I have been looking for, yearning to taste but only achieved last night. 

This is also how I would describe it. 

You know how you eat Maggi chicken flavoured instant noodles and there's this MSG laden stock that comes with it? You know how the flavour is somehow intensely chicken-y - the essence of chicken distilled into a yellow liquid? You know how home-made stock somehow never tastes like that? 

This one does. But without the icky MSG. I tell you, this is the One. 

The Best Chicken Stock Ever (The One You Have Been Looking for)

(Adapted very slightly from Smitten Kitchen)

900 g to 1kg uncooked chicken winglets and drumlets
1onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, smashed
1 teaspoon table salt 

Water - enough to fill the slow cooker. 

Place all ingredients in a slow-cooker. Cook on low for about 8 hours.

Strain out chicken parts, onion and garlic. The stock is now ready to use, or, you could put it in the fridge to chill until any fat solidifies on the top. There was very little fat to strain out though so I might skip this step next time. 

When chilled, the stock becomes this gelatinous mess (I wanted to dance when I saw that - none of my other recipes have yielded this before!). The standard explanation for this is that the bones have released their natural gelatin(?), collagen (?) and so the stock will turn into a jelly like substance when chilled. 

Notes: 

Deb Perelman used only 1 garlic clove - Mr Grey and I love garlic so I upped it to 3 - which was the original recipe anyway. She also has a huge amount of helpful info on storing the chicken stock, freezing it etc so please check out the link above if you have any questions. I try to be helpful, but between me and Ms Perelman, she is obviously the "si fu", I am but an amateur.

She also uses a much larger slow cooker - I sized the recipe down a bit. Yes, I do realise that chicken wings/winglets/drumlets are rather expensive. But so are commercially made chicken stock packets and they all have MSG, so between that and just making this myself, I'll rather make this. Besides, the chicken can be shredded up and used if you stop the cooking at around the 8 hour mark as I did. You can use the chicken in chinese chicken congee or Malay mee soto. If you have a pet, you can also shred it carefully and feed it to your pet but please be careful - chicken bones might choke your dog or cat.

Final note: Children of the '80s, remember that Gardenia bread ad? The one with the chorus "so good you can eat it on its own!". Well, that line applies perfectly to this stock - it was so good, I wanted to drink it all up on its own.

white collar kingfishers

These two little guys have been hanging out at the tiny patch of green on the way to the train station. Sometimes, they sit far apart, sometimes, like in the picture above, they sit side by side.

I look out for them everyday. The last time I tried to take a photo of them sitting together, one of them got annoyed and flew off. Today, I was more cautious and kept my distance which explains the terrible quality of the photo. The iPhone camera zoom can only handle so much.

I'm always happy to see them - either of them - perched up on the fence above the grassy verge. These little green and blue moments are so ephemeral - maybe tomorrow they'll fly away to some new hunting ground, maybe tomorrow the land will be sold, the trees cut down. Maybe.

But today, they were sitting together, side by side, and I got a photo, all of which makes for a nice start to Friday.

Celebration of the Edict of Milan

1700 years since Constantine issued the Edict of Milan.

home body

Isn't the reading corner in the picture so inviting? Saw it and couldn't resist posting it up.

I have to say, I'm really loving this stage of life when I get to have my own home and I also get to hang out with friends in their homes. Hanging out with friends in the comfort of their own living rooms and kitchens is such a luxury. It's quiet, you get unlimited water to drink, there isn't awful music playing and you don't have to buy an expensive coffee/tea to justify your stay.

Last week, I went over to H's place and she fed a home cooked dinner and a home made cheese cake :) When we were sitting around in her kitchen eating the cheesecake, my only thought was: this is so much better than any old starbucks in any old mall. It makes growing up worth it.

i wish i knew how it would feel to be free

I came to this song by way of Lighthouse family and only later heard the Billy Taylor original. In my university days, it was constantly on my playlist. This Nina Simone version is one of the best so far - I like how she starts quiet and then builds up to this crescendo at the end. If you search for it, there's a live version where she improvises on the piano as well.

This song is such a standout though - whichever version of it. Every so often, a song comes along that perfectly encapsulates some part of the human condition - music mood lyric and talent all coming together.

The lighthouse family version might not be the best out there but because I listened to it so much during my university years, it's the most memory laden one.

Music has been good medicine this week. There have been terrible happenings and I have no words to describe or talk about what's going on in the world except to say that this is a world yearning to be set free.

*

From the liturgy of the hours:

 Save us, Lord, while we are awake; protect us while we sleep; that we may keep watch with Christ and rest with him in peace.

G. Gershwin - Rhapsody in Blue, FORTISSIMO FEST 2010

The last few weeks have been filled with work and it's likely to continue for some time. But earlier this week, I ran to the bathroom during the session break and realised that the bathrooms have piped in music from 92.4 FM. I was just washing up when the familiar squeal of the clarinet curled its way into the bathroom and ended up standing there for another two minutes, smiling. Rhapsody in blue is such a favourite - at turns grand and thundering but so full of sly humour at the same time. It's a piece that doesn't take itself too seriously. This rendition on youtube is especially good I think. The clarinet bit I alluded to earlier is at 0:55 and I also liked the pianist's smile - he was listening to the clarinet (at 1:02?) and looked like he was loving it.