No Tomato Sauce, No Cream Sauce, No Meat and Still a Tasty Pasta Dish

So as you go through life you encounter more and more vegetarians and even the most ravenous carnivore will admit that most are not crazy people but people who just choose to live a different lifestyle; one without meat and potentially a longer lived one because of it. So it was a great thing when you find an inventive new recipe that you can share with your vegetarian friends that is not a salad, has some nice flavor, and doesn’t involve anything near a tofurkey. So this post features a dish that my mom actually surprised the heck out of me with one day since she doesn’t often venture into new culinary territory. If you want a crazy name for the dish let’s say “A-Friendly Kickin Pasta” (A-friendly as in animal-friendly).


A-Friendly Kickin’ Pasta
Servings: 4 healthy ones
Prep Time: ~6min
Cooking Time: ~25min

Ingredients:
• 1 box of penne pasta
• 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO)
• 4 healthy cloves of garlic (pressed then finely chopped or just crushed)
• ~4oz sun-dried tomatoes (no juice)
• ~12oz banana peppers (no juice)
• 1 healthy teaspoon of dried basil
• ~6oz fresh mozzarella (chopped to a size depending on personal preference, explained below)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions
Place EVOO and garlic in a large saucepan or stewing pot (you’re eventually going to put all of the pasta in here) and heat on a medium-low flame to slowly sauté the garlic. At the first sign of the garlic browning (very roughly 5-10 minutes) turn off the heat and add the basil. Next add the banana peppers and sun-dried tomatoes (without the juice; you can drain them or just pick them up with a fork-like utensil). Cover and let sit for a bit.
Boil the pasta (the instructions should be on the box if needed).
Uncover the A-Friendly Kickin’ sauce and taste it (don’t be shy). Add salt and pepper to taste. Then add the pasta and toss.
When you are ready to serve, cut the fresh mozzarella into pieces that size is up to you (I went with pieces a little bit thicker and shorter than a stick of gum, but base your decision on how much you like chunks of fresh mozzarella cheese flavor or having that taste spread out over the dish).

Comments
So pressing garlic is great for something like this as it really opens up the garlic and exposes its flavor. However, when you don’t have a garlic crusher (because some friend who shall remain nameless promised to buy you one a year ago…) you can press the garlic under the blade of large kitchen knife and then finely chop it. Also, I like having the fresh mozzarella in the fridge as late as possible and adding it to the dish as its cold milky flavor with provide some contrast to the hot pasta and sauce (I also like the fresh taste of cold fresh mozzarella). However, if you put the mozzarella on the pasta and warm it a bit it will melt on it nicely which is also tasty. Most importantly, I went with the easier and cheaper version of this recipe in that I used canned sun-dried tomatoes and canned+chopped hot banana peppers. My mom makes this with fresh sun-dried tomatoes and fresh sweet banana peppers. I prefer her way but its slightly more expensive, requires chopping the banana peppers, and harder to find depending on your local super market offerings.

Enjoy!


Picture 1: Ingredients


Picture 2: All together in the pot now


Picture 3: Final Product

Garlic Shrimp aka Gambas Al Ajillo

For the first mentioned recipe on this site I decided to go with one that I consider to be a guilty pleasure. A great place to get this dish (and the place that I first had it at) is Dali Restaurant and Tapas Bar in Cambridge, MA (http://www.dalirestaurant.com/). To make the dish you can use the recipe off of (http://www.df.lth.se/~thanisa/cgi-bin/wrapper.cgi?rec.food.recipes/misc3/du3); it may not be the full traditional recipe but it’s simple and does the job.

Lessons:
Substituting chili powder for fresh dried chiles
One substitution I made in this recipe was that I didn’t have a red chile pepper on hand and so I used some ground chile pepper that I had. This may have caused the heat to be drier and/or rougher but unless you are cooking a lot of ethnic foods that require chile pepper, you probably won’t have any fresh chile peppers around. Also, be wary of cheap chili powders as opposed to nicer chili powders, the former I find are often refered to as chili powders and the latter as ground chile. Chile powders can have very different tastes such as a hot cayenne powder and a sweet and smoky chipotle powder. You can find out more about chili powders at http://www.theepicentre.com/Spices/chile.html.

Brining
Instead of sprinkling salt on the shrimp, I brined them (I’m still learning how to use this technique correctly). Brining is an interesting technique of submerging food in a sugar and salt solution that flavors meats and keeps them juicy. It works by osmosis due to the higher salt concentration of the fluid than the meat, leading to absorption of salt by the meat, which drags water into the cell with it (sound familiar to those of you in med school). The influx of salt also denatures the meat proteins making them absorb and retain more water. Like many things in cooking, you can Wikipedia brining to get more details on it (I also like this website as it gives examples of flavored brines (http://www.cookshack.com/brining-101#_Toc528293321). The brining technique that I used came from http://whatscookingamerica.net/ShrimpTips.htm. To note, you need to brine with raw shrimp, if you only have cooked shrimp for the garlic shrimp recipe than salt them as the recipe says to. You can brine chicken, pork, and turkey as far as I know; so it might come in handy for that next Thanksgiving bird. I had previously been brining my shrimp for 20 minutes and it felt like the brine worked but not to its full potential. For this shrimp recipe I brined for 40 minutes, which was too long (made it too salty), so I’m going to recommend a 30 minute brine. I also threw in some coarsely chopped garlic in the brine mixture to add some flavor (note: that this addition would work better for things that brine for longer like a turkey).

Pictures:
During brining


During cooking