Bacon Parmesan Pasta

So, it’s been a really long time since I’ve posted! I have a good reason, I promise.

I’m pregnant!

Yep, hubby and I are expecting our first baby right at the beginning of the new year!

This means that pretty much since the beginning of May, I’ve been pretty uninterested in cooking. This is partly because I haven’t had much energy, particularly at the beginning when I would come home from work, lay down on the couch, and fall asleep to Friends reruns. But it’s also partly because I just haven’t been interested in food.

Let me clarify. I have been very, very interested in food like boxed mac and cheese and good old grilled cheese sandwiches made with American cheese singles and white bread. Really, anything that involved cheese. But nothing that required effort.

Poor hubby has endured lots of meals that are thrown together with a jar of spaghetti sauce, a bag of frozen meatballs, and a box of spaghetti.

In the past week or two (I’m well into my second trimester now), I’ve started to get back into cooking, but so far it’s been things I’ve made and blogged about before.

Until tonight! You are finally getting a new post about something I’ve made!

Of course, it was a meal based almost entirely on the fact that I haven’t been to the grocery store lately and didn’t have much to work with. Work with me.

I present: bacon parmesan pasta!

Start off with a chopped onion. I had less than I wanted, but the only other onion I had was pretty old and soft. So this was it. Sorry for the blurry pic.

Next, I pulled some bacon out of the freezer and thawed it. I’d purchased it when I only needed a few strips for a chicken salad, so the rest was up for grabs.

I tried to chop it up with a big knife, but that didn’t work out so well.

So I used my kitchen shears. This is why I’m always on hubby’s case not to use these as general household scissors….

Toss the bacon in a big pan and start frying it up.

After a little bit, I added the chopped onion and a teaspoon or two of minced garlic.

While it cooked up, I opened a can of artichokes and chopped them.

Back to the bacon, because I like to jump around a lot. I spontaneously added some pure maple syrup to the bacon/ onion/ garlic mixture.

Oh, did I mention I’ve been cooking pasta in another pot? No? Well, I have. Problem is, I assumed that two boxes of Wegman’s brand farfalle pasta would have the same cooking time and combined them, only realizing later that they have two different cooking times. Thanks, Wegman’s. So some of my farfalle was cooked better than other farfalle.

So after the pasta is cooked and drained, I added a bit of olive oil and tossed it until coated.

I didn’t want to drain the bacon and lose all the grease (potential flavoring), so I just used a slotted spoon to transfer the bacon and onions straight to the pasta.

Then I opened a can of diced tomatoes and added some.

Next, I added the artichokes.

Finally, seasonings. Some salt…

Some pepper…

Some Italian seasoning…

And some basil…

After I’d stirred it all up, I poured in a little of the bacon grease to give it flavor and body. Not all of it, just some.

Finally, some grated Parmesan cheese. This really should have been fresh, not the stuff in a green plastic can, but oh well. Like I said, this was made with stuff I had handy.

And since I wasn’t following my recipe too closely, I went back and tweaked ingredients after giving it a taste. I added more tomatoes, etc. Finally, it was ready to eat!

Yum!

Quite tasty. Satisfied the pregnant lady’s obsession with carbs, while also giving hubby plenty of bacon. I liked the sweetness of the maple syrup against the savoriness of everything else (that’s totally not a word, by the way). Not the healthiest thing ever, given how much of the bacon fat went into it, but I’m not counting calories right now and I haven’t gained too much weight to date so I can’t say I care too much. It was yummy and it’ll reheat well.

If you’re interested in the original, there it is. It was fairly basic (didn’t have the maple syrup, tomatoes, artichokes, or seasonings), but it’s a good place to start. It was kind of fun to make the dish my own for once, rather than following a recipe to the letter. Enjoy!

Creamy Italian Dressing

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this recipe

other than to say that sometimes, I just want to try a different dressing on my salad

and that sometimes, I prefer to make my own instead of going all the way back to the grocery store

Even if I do love Wegmans

so I look up a recipe online

and gather the necessary ingredients, which may include a lot of mayonnaise and some red wine vinegar

some sugar

some Italian seasoning (makes sense, considering I was making a creamy Italian dressing)

some garlic powder

some black pepper

and some salt (though I forgot to take a picture of it). It was an interesting mixture of things in my food processor

but it looked more normal after I blended everything up to the point where the onion was smooth

The reviews all said to wait overnight to taste it, so I didn’t try the dressing until the next day.

Maybe it’s because I know that this has raw onion and mayonnaise, but I tasted them and I thought that was weird. But I think it’s because I was looking for them. I actually think the dressing is pretty good. It was good enough to serve other people this weekend, and my little brother said he liked it, so I guess that’s good enough for me.

Here’s the recipe. I’ll put it in the recipes tab, as well.

Homemade Pizza

Seems that lately, a lot of my decisions about dinner come to me while I’m driving. Maybe it’s because I spend a lot of time in the car, or maybe it’s because the moment I leave work, I try to stop thinking about work and need to clear my mind by thinking about something else.

I was thinking about Italian sausage. I had plenty, so what could I do with it? Couldn’t do hubby’s favorite pasta dish, since I don’t have cream cheese (used that up with the everything bagels… mmmmm). Didn’t have enough peppers and onions to do my Godfather-inspired sausage and peppers dish (future post, perhaps). Hmm.

PIZZA.

Brilliant, I know. I looked up a few recipes online, begged hubby to be willing to wait a while for dinner, and got to work.

First step was to get the dough started. Heat up some water so that it’s warm – not cold, not hot – and add some yeast. 

Mix it up and let it sit for about 10 minutes to let it get creamy.

Next, mix together a few cups of bread flour, some salt, and some sugar.

Feel a little guilty about your gluten-free friends that will read this and curse you for tempting them with something they can’t have. But only a little guilty.

Add a little olive oil.

And the yeast/ water mixture.

Mix it up, and you should get something that resembles this. Cover it with a clean dishtowel and set it aside to rise.

While that was rising, I turned to the pizza sauce. It called for crushed tomatoes and tomato puree. I subbed stewed for crushed (how different could they really be?) and regular tomato sauce for the puree. Wasn’t real sure what the difference there would have been, but the large amount that they called for led me to think they didn’t just want tomato paste. And wow. In re-reading this recipe, I realized that I should have added two cans of sauce, not just one. Interesting.

In prepping, I put some of my added ingredients straight into the can. I think I didn’t want to start stuff on the stove just yet, something about timing it right with the dough. Go with it. Here’s some a good bit of brown sugar.

And Italian seasoning.

And salt and crushed red pepper flakes.

Okay, now for the stovetop fun. Heat up some olive oil and add a bunch of garlic. It looked so sparkly and pretty. Maybe I was just hungry.

Add everything else. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for a half hour.

That was easy enough.

I had some extra time, so it was time to start prepping my sausage. This nifty tool was a Christmas gift from someone who understood my reluctance to use metal utensils in my non-stick pans. This is a breaker-upper, and evidently the perfect utensil to break up and crumble Italian sausage, which is normally sticky and wants to cling in big clumps.

That’s all you get. No after pictures of the sausage crumbling because I am dumb. But I will say that I also used that utensil for the sauce, since I had so many halved tomatoes and I didn’t really want big tomato chunks. Worked pretty well.

Okay, back to the dough. It’s bigger now!

I covered the counter with some flour and rolled the dough into a circular shape before I remembered that I don’t have a circular pan or a pizza stone, just baking sheets. So then rather than re-rolling (and potentially making it tough), I just smooshed it in a rectangular pan.

Topped with sauce. In retrospect, I could have used a lot more, but I was worried about overdoing it in my enthusiasm.

And you know the drill for the rest. I added Mexican blend cheese because that’s what I had on hand. I believe I also included some grated Parmesan, and then sliced up another of those Colby-Monterey cheese sticks for a little added cheesiness.

I sliced up a bit of onion and green bell pepper VERY thinly and sprinkled them on top.

And then just grabbed some handfuls of that beautiful sausage and threw it on top.

Twenty minutes in a 350-degree oven later, this is what I had.

So beautiful. So delicious.

I think hubby was ready to eat and annoyed that I was hovering over the pizza making comments about how good it looked/ smelled and taking pictures. So then I shifted it to a cutting board and we dug in.

Here are my thoughts:

Dough: very satisfied! The only problem was that it was too soft. I like soft, doughy pizza, but this was a little like putting pizza on a slice of white bread. I think this would have been fixed with a pizza stone, but in lieu of that, I might bake the dough for a few minutes alone next time to make it a little more firm and crispy. Taste-wise, just what it should be. If you’re making it for more than 3-4 people, I’d suggest making two pizzas, but it it was a good amount for hubby and I.

Sauce: damn, I wish I’d put more on. It reminded me of a specialty sauce at a neighborhood pizza shop that lets you choose your sauce. It was simultaneously sweet, from the brown sugar, and spicy, from the rushed red pepper flakes. I do think the texture would be better with crushed tomatoes instead of stewed, but I was pleased with what we ended up with. And I had a ton leftover to stick in the freezer.

I’m thinking of making more dough and trying out a calzone or something with the leftover sauce and sausage.