zen temple dumplings

Easy recipe. I wanted something light and different than my usual weekday fair, and these were really an excellent choice. I had to borrow my parents' food processor because the mini-prep is just too small for this one, and I didn't think the blender would be up to the seriously massive stalks of asparagus I bought this week. (These were mutantly huge asparagus. I feared their heartiness.)

This is another Cooking Light recipe, from their April '07 issue, and the full recipe can be found here.

Making the filling:


Filling the filling:


For the steamer:


And on my plate:


Now realizing that it doesn't look so fantastic, but with the soy/rice vinegar/sesame oil/scallion sauce (those green blobbies are scallions), it was really good. The filling had a good bite to it, with the ginger, and the consistency was smooth. It tasted very much the way a spring meal should taste, and I liked that it wasn't overwhelmed by the soy or sesame flavors. Recommended.

mess!

It is one of my talents in the kitchen--thus far, one of the few, other than following a recipe--to make the biggest mess making the simplest recipes. The one I tried this evening is pretty much a basic spaghetti aglio e olio (garlic and olive oil), but with the addition of anchovies and breadcrumbs. And I know, most people hear anchovies and feel their gorge rising--and I know this because everyone I've told about this recipe has made the same face when hearing the name of my favorite little fish--but cooking the anchovies really changes the taste and texture, and they were so buried under layers of carbs in this particular recipe, you wouldn't have tasted them even if they were raw. Much, anyway.

But I digress. The recipe's ridiculously simple: grind, toast, and sautee breadcrumbs; boil water and cook pasta; sautee garlic, olive oil and anchovies before adding a touch of chicken stock; toss oil and spaghetti; throw in some cheese; toss in breadcrumbs; chow. And yet right now my kitchen looks like this:



So, there's one pot on the stove you can't see, for the pasta. And then there's the bowl I put the pasta in when I drained it. And there's the bowl I mashed the garlic, salt, and anchovies in before I sauteed them. And there's a cookie sheet somewhere for toasting the breadcrumbs. And in the sink, there's not only the strainer and some glasses and such from yesterday, but also the blender carafe from when I almost burned out the blender motor trying to grind bread into crumbs without liquid, as well as the mini-prep food processor I almost burned out trying to crumb bread with a machine that's not really meant to crumb bread. My mother would faint to see this sink.



Plus, I had to dirty an extra bowl to toss the pasta with the oil and breadcrumbs because the original bowl was too small, because I am awesome like that. I'm looking forward to the clean up sometime next week when I finally decide to do it.

This is the thing with the easier recipes: I try to do everything all at once. I decide to forget about the whole 1, 2, 3 step process in the recipe, and this has historically never worked well. One pan gets too hot, another thing gets too cold, and so on. Plus, when I go slow, I tend to clean up as I go, and this was not that kind of recipe. This was hurry hurry hurry eat.

On the upside, it was delicious.