Caramelized Vegetable Pasta

If you can't get your kids to eat vegetables, try caramelizing them to bring out their natural sweetness. It's as easy as tossing them in olive oil seasoned with sea salt and pepper, sauteing, grilling, or roasting them in the oven.

For a quick, affordable, nutritious meal, add pasta, leave a little broth in the bottom of the bowl, top with grated cheese and they'll come back for seconds.

Caramelized Vegetable Pasta

Yield: 4

Time: 30 minutes

Ingredients

1 small yellow onion or 3 shallots, washed, peeled, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, peeled, finely chopped
1/4 pound mushrooms, shiitake or brown mushrooms, washed, thin sliced
1 cup Italian parsley, leaves only, washed, finely chopped
1 medium carrot, washed, peeled, finely chopped
1 cup corn off the cob during the summer

1 cup broccoli stems or florets, washed, roughly chopped

1 pound pasta, preferably De Cecca, spaghetti, gnocchi pasta, penne, ziti or whatever you like
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon Kosher salt
1 tablespoon sweet butter
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Sea salt and pepper

Method

Saute all the vegetables in 1 tablespoon olive oil until softened. Season with sea salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Boil a large pot of water. Add the Kosher salt. Add the pasta. To prevent sticking, stir well throughout the cooking, about 10 minutes. Put a heat-proof cup or a Pyrex measuring cup that can hold 1 1/2 cups into the sink next to the strainer. When you drain the pasta, capture 1 1/2 cups of pasta water. Set aside.

Put the pasta back into the pot. Drizzle the remaining tablespoon of olive oil over the pasta. Toss well. Season with sea salt and pepper. Toss. To keep the pasta warm, lay a piece of aluminum foil over the top of the pot but do not seal. Set aside.

Put the sauteed vegetables back on a medium flame. Add 1/2 cup of the pasta water and the sweet butter and reduce over a medium flame for 15 minutes. Toss the vegetables to coat. Add the pasta and another 1/2 cup of pasta water. Toss the pasta and vegetables to mix well. If you need more liquid, add more of the pasta water.

Just before serving, pour the pasta, broth and vegetables into a large bowl. Serve with the grated cheese alongside.

Variations

To add heat, put 1/4 teaspoon of tabasco or a pinch of cayenne when you're sauteing the vegetables.

Add 2 cups sliced cooked chicken breast.

Add 1 cup raw shrimp, washed, deveined, roughly chopped to the vegetables when you add the pasta water.

In addition to the vegetables in the recipe, add others you enjoy, like peppers, asparagus, zucchini, celery, chopped tomatoes, even cooked potatoes.

Resignation

Being single is okay, but that might be resignation talking.

Resignation has a habit of filling silence with verbal equivalents of shrugs and open hands raised in surrender. He (or she) is the kind of emotion who sits in a comfortable chair in a corner at parties, not saying much, but making it count when he (or she) does.

Not that Resignation is devastatingly funny or heart-breakingly pithy; it isn't. His (or her) trick is timing, knowing when competition is at a minimum. Resignation is what's left when there's not that much left.

Like I wrote, he (or she) lives to fill the gap.





Oil from here. [link]

Sundance and the Sundance Film Festival

To most people the Sundance Film Festival means Park City, Utah. With a broad valley at the base of the mountains, the city has the look of a classic winter resort, except that during the Festival most people aren't skiing, they're either standing in line outside theaters or inside watching movies.

But the Festival also screens films at its namesake, the Sundance Resort, just 30 minutes away.

If you want to see some of the Festival films in a quieter setting, try seeing them at Sundance.

Sundance occupies a narrow canyon with majestic Mt. Timpanogos looking down on the slopes. The crowds of filmgoers stay in Park City so you won't have to stand in line or miss a screening because it's sold out.

After the film you can take a walk outside, enjoying the clear mountain air. To get some exercise, take a break by skiing down the mountain, then, if you're hungry, walk to the Foundry Grill and have a bowl of hot soup and a sandwich. Before you go back inside for another film, take a minute to enjoy the scenery, and, as many people do, stand on the wooden bridge and watch the turbulent stream calm itself in the reflecting pond.

That way you'll get the best of both worlds.

Good Causes

I went cross country skiing today and am need to get to bed asap, as I scheduled a dentist appointment at 7am tomorrow (why? I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time). With all that's going on in the world, I thought I'd share some of the ways we can do our part to help...

Visit Marathon Val to get information about organizing a Dress Down for Haiti, The Chic Life to participate in an Online Bakesale for Haiti, or donate directly to the Red Cross.

Matt (No Meat Athlete) is donating revenue from this months' page views to The Humane Society of the United States, so go click around in his archives.

Another cause near and dear to my... err, heart, Musselman's is donating 10cents to the National Breast Cancer Foundation for every Musselman's Natural Apple Sauce purchased in the month of January! There's still a couple weeks to help out, and you can make some Acorn Apple Soup to warm up. (Full disclosure: Musselman's sent me the package below to sample/review!)

Sticky

Wet-spot and post-bonk jokes aside, there's a kind of cosmic glue that holds people together.

You know the kind of glue you buy at the hardware store to repair stuff you've broken at home? The kind that costs a mint and requires two tubes of foul-smelling, vaguely dangerous-looking goo? Well, dating is the process of mixing the two parts of this Love Epoxy together. We squeeze, mix, apply, clamp, wait, and at some point you'll figure out if you're attached to the other person or not.

Unfortunately, even the best glue can come unstuck. Just as when you repair that lamp or piece of crockery, relationships can split along the same axis to which you applied the sticky stuff in the first place. This is not pessimism. It is simply an observation of change within relationships that we're powerless to stop.

The upside is that if one epoxy formula loses its 'stick' there are always other combinations that will work. In fact, I'd say that relationship maintenance - the same as preventive maintenance on your car - is all about exploring other kinds of glue. Experimenting with small amounts of other compounds can be fun, and might lead you to lots of different ways to stay together.

Fitting together's great, but sticking together's good too.



Pic from here.[link]

Be Prepared, Boy and Girl Scouts

If we were serious about dating, we'd spend time preparing. We'd ask ourselves questions, pre-think scenarios, contemplate the the optimum outcome - in other words, we'd to a little homework.

Dating is a combination of job interview, performance evaluation, therapy session, doctor's appointment, détente, casting call, trial, interrogation and water-boarding (giving and taking.) Granted, not all dates encompass all elements. Some dates are like a delightful walk through a perfumed garden, others more like being assigned to watch an endless loop of your least favourite tv show.

If you're anything like me, you worry way more about how you look and smell before you head out on a date. Freshly bathed? Check. Shaved? Check. Man perfume? Check. Hair? Check. Clothing and shoes and accessories? Check. Right. Good to go.

No need to discontinue all that, but a little time thinking would be useful too, particularly in the early innings. Instead of reacting to whatever is said or whatever happens, spend time pondering the following:

Is there an outcome I have in mind for this date?

Is it the dating part I like, or the person?

Am I looking for a LTR, a shag, or something in-between?

What non-verbal messages do I broadcast?

What are the red flags I should look for?

How will I react when she (inadvertently or purposely) finds a button?

Will I be scrupulously honest about everything? (Feelings too.)

What do I want to know about my date?

Plus a million others...

I think it matters less what you think about than the fact that you are thinking about it. Any mental space you create between the real world and the world in your head is filled with pure oxygen. In that gap lies what I call my 'Understanding Room' where I get to see life stuff more clearly. There's room for understanding there.

Humans are good at creating mental paths around abstracts like "Why am I dating this person?" We justify, ignore, look the other way, think of something else, mask, divert, pretend, create straw men (and women) and convolute any number of ways to do anything but look at life straight-on.

But I have strayed from the dating idea. Think of it this way: folks who fly aeroplanes spend a lot of time in simulators where they can practise stuff that will keep the machine upright when the real world gets tricky. The simple act of thinking through 'what ifs' ahead of time makes a difference.






Picture from here. [link]

Friday Fluffer - Caged Heat

Although I cannot find the article online, I read recently about a woman falling in love with a man in prison. Unusual, to be sure, but not unheard of. Until you know their ages; she is 75, and he is 37. Crikey. That's odd enough in the non-incarcerated community, but when one party lives in the iron-bar motel...can we say 'screw loose'?

Which might not be the best expression if one's putative lover is doing porridge.

The big question is why anyone would fall for someone who is:

a) a criminal and

b) locked up.

But people do, and not just for non-violent felons. Serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy attracted many women correspondents. Front and centre, those gals are fucked up.

How about we make a little money from this romantic backwater and set up a social network for folks looking for a little caged heat? Unfortunately, I'm too late. Here's Meet-an-Inmate, serving inmates and their free lovers since 1998. [link]


Also Jailbabes. [link]