Friday's dinner began with me craving a pasta bake - something nice and simple and comforting after our second week of work. However, we still don't have an oven. A bit of a look around the internet made me think that pasta cooked like a risotto would be an acceptable substitute. I used that recipe and made my very first passoto. It was good, but I still missed the pasta bake.
It would be good to do this with wine and a cheese like pecorino, as the original recipe suggests. Also sausage bits would have been nice as per my usual pasta bake. Some cream of some sort (cream cheese would have done!) would have made the sauce less intense and more comfort-food-esque.
Passoto
Serves 3 (leftovers! Yum)
1/2 an onion
1 clove garlic
2 servings of pasta (conchiglie)
Splash of soju (any alcohol will do)
Tomato sauce
Water
Broccoli
Seasoning
Random other things I added: small handful of cheese, two splashes of milk, one splash of balsamic vinegar, one small green pepper, and I may have deglazed the pan with lemon vinegar just before adding the pasta.
Chopped the onion and garlic and fried in an oiled pan on a medium heat. Added the pasta and stirred to cover it in the oil. Added some maple soju (the only alcohol on hand: Korean vodka, about 20% strength) and stepped back as it burned off. Poured in the tomato sauce and enough water to cover. Cooked, stirring periodically, until the pasta was quite soft. Added some stalks of frozen broccoli and seasoning and various other additions and cooked for a further ten minutes or so. Served with more cheese, which was a mistake. Leftovers were eaten without cheese and were much nicer.
Last night we went out for dinner with a colleague, to a Korean barbeque place. It was insane (and all-you-can-eat! Yay!). You pick out a bunch of raw, marinaded meat/fish, along with some leaves (lettuce and sesame - the sesame ones tasted kind of like liquorice, I was not a fan) and sauces. The two sauces I tried were a sweet-and-sour tomato-y thing, and a fairly sweet sesame soy thing. (I have no idea what they actually were, in case you can't tell.) You cook the meat at the table, on a heated plate/stove, wrap the cooked meat in the leaves, dip it in the sauce, and eat it. It was unbelievably messy, and tons of fun, and mostly delicious. One particular piece of meat was marinaded in something particularly spicy. But Korean barbeque is definitely something I'll do again!
