Woah! I've not been doing much lately!

I haven't really been making much in the way of food that's very exciting. Mostly, I've been working and making much of the same old, same old. I kind of wish I'd thought to pay attention to tonight's meal, but I'll do my best to at least give a recipe:

Lemon Pepper Chicken with Creamy Pasta
1 chicken breast
1/2 sweet onion (I went with Mayan as usual!)
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 pound thin spaghetti
1 large lemon
2 cups peas
1 package Neufchatel cheese (any farmer's cheese or cream cheese will work)
3 T of pesto
a small handful of mixed Italian cheese
olive oil
butter (totally optional)
bit of stock
liberal amounts of pepper
salt

First, thinly slice half an onion. Get those slices as thin as possible! Then, mince your garlic.
Get some oil in a pan on medium heat. When the oil's hot, add the onion and garlic and a pinch of salt. Stir it around so that the onions and garlic get all caramelized and delicious, but not actually burned in any way. Turn the heat to medium-low and add the optional butter or just let it kind of hang out as is, your choice.
Salt and pepper the chicken breast and when the onions/garlic are cooked and golden soft and delicious, take them out of the pan.
Add another shot of oil and get the chicken going. While the chicken is browning, zest and juice one large lemon. When the chicken is well browned on both sides, add about 1 cup of chicken or vegetable stock and 1/2 of the zest, along with a couple of teaspoons of lemon juice. Let this go at medium heat until the chicken is totally cooked through, moist, and perfect.
Set the chicken aside when it's done, add more stock to the pan for any additional deglazing and set this liquid aside as well.
Sprinkle a bit of lemon zest onto each side of the chicken and spoon some lemon juice on top. Add a final shot of pepper and let it hang out.

Meanwhile, get a bowl out, and into it add your pesto, Neufchatel, onions, garlic, and Italian cheese. Just go hog wild into that thing. Add some salt and pepper while you're at it. Excess is NEVER too much! Mix it all together and thin it out with the stock and deliciousness mixture from the chicken pan. You won't need more than a couple of tablespoons at the most of the cooking liquid. Add the rest of the lemon zest and maybe a couple of spoonfuls of lemon juice--just taste it as you go and decide what it needs. Make sure you have a little bit of lemon juice at the end, since you might want to add a little bit at the end.

Break the spaghetti strands into thirds, cook them as usual, and add the peas at the end to cook briefly. Drain the peas and pasta and add the cheese sauce. Get it really well stirred and taste to see what you have to add. At this point in the game, I needed a little more lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Your mileage may vary.

Get some peas/pasta into a bowl, add a chicken breast to the top of it, and spoon a little bit of the chicken cooking liquid into the chicken once it's served. Your tastebuds will love you. This is a pretty darn delicious dish!

But mostly, I've been working and coming home and cooking boring food, as I mentioned up above. I'm working at a visiting, temporary museum exhibition which involves seeing a lot of people looking at other people, except those other people are dead and have no skin. Frequently, they also have various fewer internal organs than your average alive person. We've had some fainters, at least one girl who left in tears, and a number of people who, overwhelmed, had to step out for some fresh air before tackling the finish. I think it's kind of funny, really. I mean, they're dead. It's not like they're going to complain at you or something. At this job, I spend an awful lot of time telling people where the bathrooms are (LEARN TO READ SIGNS, PEOPLE, OH MY GOD) and how to use audio guides.

The audio guides, in case you haven't been to any museum anywhere at all in the entire world in the last twenty years or so, generally look like this:

This is, of course, a crude MSPaint representation of an audio guide that I drew in about three minutes, but it includes all the major details: The speaker, the buttons, the cord. You know. The stuff. So, the way you use a modern audio guide, is you look at various exhibits in a museum. Some of these exhibits will have numbers next to them--usually in bright bold colors and large friendly font. When you want to learn more about these exhibits, you type those large friendly numbers next to the exhibit into the audio guide and press that green "play" button. Put that speaker part up top next to your ear like a phone and enjoy! If the volume is too low for you, press "9." If the volume is too high for you, press "7." It's not very complicated. At most, it's four buttons at any given location and three of those buttons are numbers 0-9.

Why is it, then, that so many people have this totally glazed expression when you tell them this?

Also, I have been to many a museum. Justin has been to even more, and on multiple continents. Never have I or Justin been to a museum that allows any kind of eating or drinking inside the exhibits. If you have never been to a museum before, let me give you a helpful tip. You can't eat or drink ANYTHING while you're in the galleries. You also cannot touch anything. If the exhibit is NOT permanent, photography will absolutely NOT be allowed. EVER. EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER. So when museum personnel tell you kindly for the ten thousandth time that no, we do not have a cafe in the museum for your convenience, nor can you have a snack because, god forbid, you haven't eaten within the last half hour, don't be so totally butthurt. If you're going to the museum eat and drink ahead of time. Also, no, you can't touch ANYTHING. It's an exhibit. The things inside the exhibit are almost certain to be delicate and/or expensive and the difficulty at repairing those items will range from "hard" to "snowball's chance in hell." So hands off. 

Now, when you go to a standard, permanent, art museum, say, the Seattle Art Museum for example, there will usually be two parts: The permanent exhibit and the visiting exhibit. The visiting exhibit is what you see giant posters and banners for outside the art museum. At virtually all museums, you can take pictures of the permanent exhibit--the stuff that's there all the time. You can almost NEVER take pictures of the visiting exhibits. This is because the museum does not own the visiting exhibits, and so does not have the rights to the images contained within those exhibits and therefore cannot extend any rights to those images to you, the visitor. If a touring exhibit is coming through town and will only be there a short time, just assume that the exhibit is permanently in visiting exhibit status and therefore photography will, by default, not be allowed under any circumstances. It is a very rare touring exhibit that allows photography. So please don't act all butthurt about that, either. It's pretty common policy and if the world weren't so sue happy and if people weren't so careless and stupid, you probably would be able to take pictures. But the world isn't and people aren't, so you can't.

AND TURN YOUR PHONE OFF, DAMMIT. First of all, it's incredibly rude and intrusive to have a ringing phone/phone conversation in a museum. Secondly, if the exhibit you're viewing prohibits photography, the employees in that exhibit are going to be paranoid as all hell that every single person in the world is taking photos. Since everyone and their mom has a camera phone, leave the phone off, put away, and ignored for the ENTIRE duration of your stay. I don't care if you're texting. I don't care if your grandmother is in the hospital. I don't care if you're the goddamn Batman and your cell is the only way the mayor can get in touch with you during the daytime, KEEP YOUR PHONE PUT AWAY. We WILL search your pictures and will ride your ass the entire rest of the time you're in the exhibit to keep you off of your phone. It sucks for us, it sucks for you, just don't do it.

So that's what I do, really. I police the masses and educate on the finer points of museum-visiting etiquette. And then I come home and complain about my poor sore feet, cook dinner, and, after spending way too long on Facebook games, go to bed.

It's what I do all day. Sigh.

But tomorrow is Christmas Eve and then Christmas Day and then Boxing Day, which is when I can box up all the feast leftovers for the servants! Hurray! They'll be so glad!

Pasta with Meaty Pork Tomato Sauce

So it appears that pork is the new beef in our household. We can get SUPER cheap pig at Metropolitan Market and I like that it's so versatile. This particular meal is a pretty usual one. I'm going to show my usual meat mixture that I use for meatballs and sauces first, since that's really the bulk of this. So, for your pig, you'll need:

2 pounds of ground pork

1/2 large onion, diced

2 tablespoons of pesto (or other fresh herbs)

2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 egg

2 tsp each of

   paprika

   cumin (I usually use whole--cut it down to 1 tsp if you're using ground)

   oregano

   basil (I like sweet basil, but use whatever kind you want to)

   parsley

1 tsp of the following

   Italian seasoning blend (mine has some rosemary and sage)

   chili powder

a few tablespoons of Parmesan cheese

salt and pepper to taste (go a little easy on the salt, since you've got the cheese)

Get it all mixed up thoroughly! Don't be afraid to use your hands and really get in there--clean hands are a cook's best tools. I usually use a pound at a time for most things, so when I mix it fresh, I pack half of it into a quart-size plastic baggie and press it flat so there's no (or at least very little) air in the bag. Then, I stick it flat in the freezer. It takes up very, very little space and it's quick defrosting since it's spread so thinly.

Get it into a stainless steel pan with a bit of olive oil  that's been preheated on medium/medium-high heat. Remember, I'm a "fiddler" so I tend to babysit my cooking. Use whatever stove setting you usually use for getting things golden brown and delicious. I almost never use nonstick for cooking meats, since I want all those little brown bits on the bottom for added flavor. And let it cook so that it does get nice and brown. I didn't shape the meat this time.

Oh, yeah... Mmmm... See that little beautifully-browned chunk of pork at the bottom, there? That is your friend. Your delicious, delicious friend. When your meat is fully browned, add a little bit of stock to the pan to deglaze (red wine also works for this particular meal, but I think I just used chicken stock or something equally boring and delicious.)

Now, for your sauce! You can go ahead and used a jarred sauce if you like. I find that those are often too salty and the chunks of tomato give me really gnarly heartburn, so I get a can of tomato sauce ($1) and add stuff until it's delicious.

I don't have any lovely ingredient photos for you, but here's how it went down:

1 24-oz can of tomato sauce (again, $1. One freaking dollar! How great is THAT?!)

3 T pesto

3 T awesome sauce (details kind of in the middle of this post)

1/2 sweet onion, diced (I like using the Mayan sweet onions. All the time. In everything. I think I want to marry them.)

1/2 sweet onion sliced (half moons, please, sliced VERY thinly)

3-4 cloves of garlic, diced very finely

salt

pepper

some kind of Italian cheese for added flavor

Soften the onions and garlic in the pot on medium heat with olive oil before adding the tomato sauce. Let the tomato sauce come to a simmer before adding all the other stuff. Do not skimp on flavoring! I like to have a piece of bread torn into small pieces on hand to get an idea of how the sauce tastes ON something. A sip from a spoon is good policy, but can seem overpowering, so it's nice to get an idea of how it tastes otherwise. So yeah, just add bits and pieces of everything, stirring frequently, until everything is combined and warmed through.

Add half of the sauce to the meat mixture once the pork is fully cooked and the pan is deglazed. Save the other half of your sauce for another delicious, delicious meal. This is a LOT of sauce. Stir the sauce and meat together well, set the heat to low, and let everything hang out and become good buddies.

Get your pasta boiling. I break my pasta in half before adding it to the pot since I don't own anything that's a good size for cooking pasta. Someday I'll have a stock/pasta pot! I believe in ME! :D

I used fettuccine noodles, but use whatever rocks your boat. I like thicker pastas (no thinner than spaghetti!) for meat sauces. The heartiness of the noodles stands up well to the heartiness of the meat. For a meat-free sauce, I'll usually just use spaghetti.

Add sauce and meat to pasta and profit!

Yum! I wish I could eat pasta with tomato sauce every single day, but my esophagus would never forgive me. Alas...

Unorthodox Spinach Pesto

I love flavors. I like sweetness, I like sourness, I like saltiness, and I like bitterness. Especially with vegetables (except brussels sprouts. They're a little TOO bitter. But straight up cabbage? Hell yeah!) and spinach is one of my favorites. I love it raw, I love it cooked, I love it smothered with cheese and baked into a casserole (I ESPECIALLY love it smothered in cheese and baked into a casserole!) but there are some dishes where the texture of spinach and its overwhelming flavor aren't appropriate in the amounts you'd usually want to put in as a vegetable portion. So, I thought, spinach pesto! With parsley, because parsley is DELICIOUS.

Traditionally, a pesto is made with basil, pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, and balsamic vinegar. However, I think my favorite pesto is one that I made with basil, parsley, walnuts, garlic, and olive oil. It has a lighter flavor than traditional pesto, but it's still delicious! This spinach pesto is an experiment, but I think it's pretty good.

Ingredients:
One bunch of raw spinach
One bunch of parsley (flat-leaf, if you can get it. I went with curly, which has a sharper flavor)
Four cloves of garlic
1/2c or so of almonds
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper

Into a food processor, add your nuts. Anything with a milder flavor would work. Walnuts are especially nice if pine nuts are too expensive (which, for me, they always are) but almonds give a unique sweetness that I thought would be useful for this recipe.

Then, because you got ahead of yourself, turn away and get your leaves washed and dried. Be very, very thorough with your washing! There's usually a lot of sand/dirt in leafy greens, since those leaves are close-packed and hold onto dirt with a passion.

Pretty! Either let these drain really thoroughly, or pull out your handy-dandy salad spinner. I found my salad spinner out by the dumpster at my apartment complex. ROCK!

You want to get as much of the water off as you can before adding your leaves to your processor. Water and oil don't mix, and you eventually want to incorporate lots of olive oil into your pesto, and if it's too wet, that will be difficult to do effectively. Don't worry about it being perfectly bone-dry, just spin it through a few times. Add a handful of each to the food processor.

Now, my food processor has a pretty small bowl and it's pretty old, so I have half of the nuts, two cloves of garlic, and a handful each of spinach and parsley. I ground these down, added another handful of spinach and another handful of parsley, and blended in oil as I pulsed the processor until I'd incorporated half of the spinach and half of the parsley. Between handfuls of herbs, I scraped the sides of my processor bowl. If you have a bigger, better, newer processor, you might not need to deal with all of this. I don't have one of those, so I had to take a bit more effort.

Don't skimp on olive oil.

Let me repeat that to make sure it's abundantly clear:

Don't. Skimp. On. Olive. Oil.

Olive oil is what will make your pesto smooth as silk and hearty and delicious. You will use a lot of oil. This is a good, good thing. Olive oil is good for you! Love it. Use it. Eat it. You want your finished to pesto to look kind of like this:

It's smooth and uniformly blended and totally delicious! This is really potent stuff, but it would be delicious mixed in with a cream sauce, added to a pan sauce, smothered over a mild meat like pork or chicken and roasted, etc. Probably not eaten with a spoon. This stuff is really strong. AND DELICIOUS!