Reflection 4

Naked Pasta. Do not cover it up. Do not hide your pasta. You have nothing to be ashamed of! Put it out there in the open. The biggest problem with eating pasta is what we pour over it or that we eat pasta as though it were the only thing in the bowl.

I have instituted a new pasta rule in my kitchen. Equal parts pasta to other ingredients in the bowl. This actually mean that my bowl of pasta will only be 1/3 pasta and the rest will be either veggies or meat. Obviously the less meat the better it is for you - but I'm an omnivore - so toss meat in. But that's what's so great about this kind of tossed pasta, everything goes a long way, so you don't need much of anything. Now there is an unlimited variety of ingredients you can toss with pasta, but tossing is the key. Nothing but the pasta and meat needs to be cooked. The less you cook your ingredients the more you will individually taste them. So it's a bit of personal preference as to how much you want your ingredients to stand out in the final dish as to how long you should cook them.

Here's what's in the bowl above:
Cheese Tortellinis (1 small package). 1 chicken breast. 4 sundried tomatoes cut into strips. 3 cremini mushrooms diced. 2 small ripe tomatoes diced. 1 shallot sliced. 1 stem of fresh basil cut into strips. 1/2 lemon. Shredded Romano cheese.

My personal secret to naked pasta of all sorts is pan frying my pasta. Here's how. Boil your pasta as usual. While it's boiling, start cooking your meat. Lets say for example it's chicken. I mixed my chicken chunks with olive oil, rosemary and thyme. when the meat is almost completely cooked, squeeze half a lemon's juice into the hot pan, it will cause the meat (and the pan) to caramelize the sugars in the lemon juice, giving you a rust colored rich savory glaze, turn down your heat enough to not burn it. Drain you pasta and toss it in the pan with your meat and let it fry in the caramelized glaze. The pasta will brown as it frys. Then turn off the heat and throw everything else in and toss! You can do this same trick with pork/sherry and beef/red wine.