Bacon Alfredo Pasta

I think I loved this project so much because I spent the entire cooking sipping on champagne. This was actually back when I need champagne to kill a set of flies that couldn't have conveniently died with the first batch of autumn air. There's something about sipping on champagne, singing every song on your iPod (getting more and more into it, but more and more off key, with every sip), and cooking that makes me want to watch an 80s chick flick. However, I do apologize if some of the pictures lack any real … photographic merit. Like I said, sipping on champagne the entire time I cooked.


So for this, you need bacon, broccoli, Alfredo sauce, and penne pasta. I love Felicia gluten-free pasta. It's a rice/corn flour pasta. While nothing holds quite like corn pasta, I've yet to find it in penne form, and this is pretty amazing in and of itself. And, if you'd like, a glass of champagne with a strawberry in it.


First, cook your bacon. Actually, the right word is burn your bacon. The more cooked your bacon is, the more it will crumble. And since I prefer my bacon overcooked anyway, it made sense to just leave it in the pan a little longer to get a bit of a char to it.


Once your bacon is cooked, pour your Alfredo sauce into a saucepan and crumble in the bacon. Set the burner for low and just let the sauce combo simmer.


Now it's time to set the pot to boil for the pasta. Once the water is boiling and the pasta is cooking, prepare another saucepan to steam your broccoli. Steaming broccoli is a lot easier than it appears. All you need is a saucepan with about a centimeter of water in it and a strainer. Open the strainer in the saucepan (you'll know you have the right amount of water if the surface of the water just covers the legs of the strainer, but never goes above the strainer's floor). Cover it up and set the water to boil. Once the water is boiling, add the broccoli, re-cover the pan, and let everything cook for 3-5 minutes (assuming the broccoli isn't frozen).


Now, it's just a case of prepare and enjoy! The bacon's rich (let's be real: epic) flavor will have made its way throughout the entire sauce. And it might just be the semi-drunkard in me talking, but no pasta sauce tastes as good as pasta sauce with a little bacon in it ;)

Making Risotto (Really, It's Not That Scary)

I am a huge fan of "Hell's Kitchen". Not only is it one of the few reality show competitions where everyone is judged purely on their actual talent (not on their ability to strategize, backstab, and appeal to the 40-something soccer mom crowd), but it also makes me want to cook. Specifically, cook the common foods in the show.


Quite easily the most common dish on "Hell's Kitchen" involves some sort of risotto. I had never cooked risotto but, judging from how often the contestants mucked it up, it looked quite difficult to do.


But, how does that bit of advice go? Do something every day that scares you? Or at least: do something every day that you're guaranteed to muck up as well?


So, for this particular dish, I used:
Arborio Rice (aka uncooked Risotto rice)
Chicken Broth (for the risotto) -- you are going to need around 4-5 cups of broth for every 1 cup of risotto
Spicey Chicken Sausage
Scallions
Peas


Cooking risotto turned out to be pretty easy…once I got over the overwhelming fear I got over needing two pans to cook rice. I had just figured out how to cook regular rice without burning it -- and now I need two pans to make this complicated contraption?


But it's okay. In a sauce pan, pour in the chicken broth and keep the broth on a low heat. In a flat pan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter with 1 tablespoon of oil. If you'd like, you can take this time to sauté finely-chopped onions.


Now it is time to sauté the risotto. Pour in the risotto (I recommend making no more than 1 cup of risotto your first go-around) and stir. It is recommended to use a wooden spoon so as to not break the rice. I don't own any wooden spoons, but I do own a strainer with a wooden handle! Sauté for roughly 2 minutes, constantly stirring with your wooden spoon/handle (and while we're at it, why not bust out an old ruler to stir…)


Now, slowly add in the broth, one ladle-full at a time. Briskly stir in the broth until it is fully absorbed before adding more broth.


In an homage to the constant risotto-flipping in "Hell's Kitchen", I made sure to get a few pan flips and shakes in myself.


The nice thing about risotto is that you can add essentially anything to it. Just consult the 8 seasons of "Hell's Kitchen" for evidence (Hell, for the most recent finale of "Hell's Kitchen", one contestant created a scallop risotto, combining the two most common dishes into one nightmare of an appetizer). For this particular dish, I cooked up chicken sausage, boiled some peas, and chopped up some scallions.


Continue cooking your risotto, adding ladles of broth for 20-30 minutes. You'll know your risotto is done when:
- The rice takes on a creamy consistency
- The rice has a firm bite to it, but isn't crunchy (much like regular rice)


Mix everything together and serve.


The only drawback to risotto is that it doesn't keep well, so eat up once it's ready. Which, when paired with amazing ingredients like spicy chicken sausage and scallions, that's not a hard thing to do.


And, really, you can add anything to it, the same way you can add anything to rice. Another thing you can do is sprinkle a layer of shredded cheese. Here's another dish I made -- roughly the same as before, only with cheese, hot sauce (Valentina's, of course), and broccoli.

Quite Possibly the Healthiest Spaghetti and Meat Sauce You Could Ever Make

I genuinely believe that the only way to make this any healthier is by removing entire ingredients. And life's too short to skimp like that.

The ingredients are as so:
- One package of corn pasta (aka gluten-free)
- One jar of organic marina sauce
- One pound of organic, grass-fed beef
- One package of chicken sausage
- A smidgen of salt and oregano (not pictured)

As I've mentioned before, I'm trying to reduce my gluten intake. I'm not here to convert people, but I believe that studies that find a link between gluten and weight gain, sluggish behavior, and overeating. While this personal crusade is a lost cause on bread (gluten-free bread is not bread; it is microwaved cardboard shreds), corn pasta has been my saving grace. Rice pasta is very sticky and doesn't keep well (meaning no leftovers), but corn pasta is absolutely amazing. Corn/rice hybrid pasta is pretty good, but that's for another day.

I first set the oven to 425*F and baked the chicken sausage for roughly 30 minutes, or until the skin had browned. After it was fully cooked, I set the sausage aside to cool off while I worked on the spaghetti.

The best part of corn pasta is that it cooks like regular wheat pasta -- and it tastes the same as well. So I was able to go on autopilot and boil my spaghetti for the standard 8 - 10 minutes.

While the pasta was boiling, I cooked the beef in a sauce pan, periodically breaking the beef apart with my spatula. Organic, grass-fed beef has a slightly different texture than the standard grocery store beef, so more attention does have to be made to dicing up the beef with your spatula.

During that cooking process, I cut the chicken sausage into disks. Once the beef was fully cooked, I mixed in the sausage and the marinara sauce, along with a pinch of salt and oregano, and let everything simmer, stirring occasionally. It's not a lot to look at, but the smell was incredible. Add in a pinch of salt, or oregano, or even a little garlic powder for that extra zing.

Once the pasta was drained and rinsed, I added everything together, along with some parmesan cheese and sourdough bread (which I will fully admit made this a little less healthy, but c'mon -- it's sourdough!). This meal is so filling and so delicious. The best part is that there is less guilt about scarfing down carbs at a near hysterical pace.