Me Make Pasta

My friend Maureen has an amazing blog on real vegetarian cooking at The Vegetarian Salmon, and she keeps pestering me to cook more, so even though I suck at the cooking, the motivating to cook, and the blogging about the cooking, I'm (sort of) really trying to do better.

Last week I bought some awesome olives from the olive bar at Gigante and bought a yellow squash with the intention of doing some sort of pasta thing. There's this pasta that's probably been in my cabinet since I moved in in 2002, but it doesn't go bad, right? Well I never got around to it, and the squash got squishy. So that didn't work, but this week, I again got my intentions up and bought another squash and some fresh garlic.

I'll start backwards. The dish was OK the night I made it, but I had leftovers today and it was really good. All the flavors had soaked together in the pasta and it was pretty darn tasty. I guess that's a semi-success. Here's what it looked like.

Here's what I did.

I cut up the squash while heating some olive oil and a pressed garlic clove in a small pan. Then I set the water boiling. As the oil heated, I cut up the squash. Then I threw it in and started pitting and cutting the olives. I sauteed the squash for a while. I just tasted it until it seemed good and cooked. I think there may be some more cook-ish way of telling, but this seemed to work. I heated up some leftover TJ's Arrabiata sauce as the pasta went in the boiling water. Eventually I added everything together in a plastic bowl (Maureen says this is bad, but I'm not sure why), added some fresh Parmesan and my signature garlic bread

(Take a pre-sliced, frozen multi-grain baguette and throw some butter, oregano, basil, garlic, and garlic salt on it and bake until it looks good.)

I know I used the wrong pasta, and apparently the wrong bowl, but this wasn't bad. I put together food I liked, it was pretty easy, quick, and it sort of worked.

Madcon - Soul Hop

Madcon is a hip-hop group with a huge dose of soul production. If the Roots went all out with the funk soul music, you'd pretty much have Madcon. There are keys, horns, and soulful choruses. Beggin' is an immediate hit that you may have already heard. The question is will these guys be the next Black Eyed Peas, the next Outkast, or more tragically, the next Pharcyde?

I also like Wholehearted, Liar, and Shine.



Admittedly, this video is not so great with the respecting of the women, but what can I say, I like the song.