Fettuccini Alfredo

A little over a year ago, I was struggling with trying to manage working full-time, trudging through a full course load at school, and keeping tabs on a puppy who seemed unable to figure out that she was supposed to pee outside in the grass, not in the kitchen, and who was absolutely terrified of being left alone.

This kind of cuteness helped me keep my sanity.

One morning, I was trying to get ready for work. It was 6am and 25 degrees out and I was outside with the puppy for a good 30-40 minutes, trying to convince her to go to the bathroom. Finally, I gave up and brought her back into the house. She immediately ran over to her big brother’s crate and took a giant dump in it.

Funny in retrospect, but I burst into tears.

Later on in the day, I told hubby about how overwhelmed I was, and he felt really bad. Bad enough that he decided to make me dinner. He asked me what I’d like, and I think I said something like “Something warm and gooey with a lot of carbs.”

So he made ooey gooey chicken bacon fettucini alfredo. It was amazing.

That’s not what this post is about.

This post is about my lazy, weeknight, not-enough-ingredients version of the meal. I left out the bacon, the chicken, the mushrooms, all that, and just focused on the alfredo sauce itself since I had a ton of cheese to work with.

See, here’s my Monterey Jack cheese.

And my parmesan cheese.

Anyway, cook up some pasta in salted water. You know how it works.

For the sauce, melt some butter. I really love butter.

Add a lot of garlic. I also really love garlic.

Add flour, stir it up and cook until creamy, then start adding milk.

Add it gradually and let it cook and simmer before adding too much so that it can incorporate the milk little by little. Also add half and half.

And at some point, add cheese. But don’t take pictures of it because you’re trying to talk and cook at the same time, and that is hard enough without remembering to take pictures.

I topped it with some leftover shrimp from a baked scampi dish the night before, and that was that!

Delicious, but there are definitely some changes I wish I could go back in time and make:

(1) I used minced garlic and it created chunks in a creamy sauce. Wish I’d used garlic powder for the sake of a better consistency.

(2) I wish I’d made the sauce in a crappy pan so that I would have felt free to use a wire whisk, as I just couldn’t get it as smooth as I wanted it to be with a wooden spoon.

(3) Pay more attention. Hubby and I were talking, and with my attention divided, I think something suffered. I’m not sure what, because it did taste pretty good, but it just didn’t have that wow factor.

(4) Leave it to hubby to sneak in the whole cream so that the sauce achieves that oh-so-amazing creaminess that I can’t hope to capture with skim milk. Hey, bad days entitle you to a little sin.

Still, all in all, it was a decent meal.