Marvelous Family Weekend, part two
2002-05-27 @ 4:34 p.m.
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Sunday evening Jake and I cooked dinner together. The recipe was her pick from Cooking Light (Jan/Feb 2002). She made the Seafood Fettuccine, and I made the pasta.
I don't usually cook with anyone else, not because I don't enjoy it. I've always enjoyed cooking with friends as long as we have a good understanding of who's responsible for what, and as long as we can use different parts of the kitchen. A little music and some company in the kitchen can be a good thing.
I started out on the pasta, because that takes the longest. I've used several different recipes for fresh pasta. It's basically flour, eggs and olive oil. I had a little trouble with this batch of dough because it was too sticky. The recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, 4 eggs and a drizzle of olive oil. I don't know if it was the weather conditions or something else. I've made this recipe before and it turned out fine. But I kept adding flour until it was the right consistency. The dough has to be firm enough to run through the pasta machine without it sticking to everything. When Badsnake gave me the pasta machine for Christmas, Jake and Sara gave me a pasta cookbook. In its instructions it tells you to divide the dough into small portions and run each through the first setting several times. Run it through, sprinkle flour on it, fold it into thirds and run it through again. I don't always need to run it through so many times, but this dough needed the extra work. Run the pasta through the machine at progressively thinner settings until you get it to the thickness you want. Then put it through the cutter, and lay it out to dry a little.
When I took a cooking class on making pasta, the instructor said you don't really have to have a pasta machine to make pasta. You can roll it out with a rolling pin and cut it with a pizza cutter. I've made pasta that way, but it's a lot easier with the machine. You get better consistency of thickness.
Once the pasta is cut, it goes into salted, boiling water. Fresh pasta doesn't need to cook long (5 to 15 seconds depending on thickness), so put it in the boiling water at the last minute.
Here is the recipe Jake used for the Seafood Fettuccine. We cut the portions in half because it serves eight, and there were only four of us. Seafood isn't usually very good left over. (This is the full recipe.) The sauce will be a little thin, but it coats the pasta well. The magazine suggests drying the shrimp and scallops with a paper towel before cooking to keep them from diluting the sauce.
1 1/2 tbsp butter
1 cup chopped green onions
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 lb med. shrimp, peeled
1 lb scallops
2 cups half-and-half
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
1/2 lb lump crabmeat, shell pieces removed
3/4 cup grated fresh Parmesan cheese, divided
8 cups hot cooked fettuccine (about 1 lb uncooked pasta)
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
Melt butter in a 12-in nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add onions and garlic; saute 1 minute or until tender. Add shrimp and scallops; 3 minutes or until done. Reduce heat to medium-low.
Add half-and-half, salt, pepper, and crabmeat; cook 3 minutes or until thoroughly heated, stirring constantly (do not boil). Gradually sprinkle 1/2 cup cheese over seafood mixture, stirring constantly; cook 1 minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. combine pasta and seafood mixture in a large bowl. Top each serving with 1 1/2 teaspoons cheese and 1 1/2 teaspoons parsley. Yield: 8 servings.
Substitutions: We used claw crabmeat instead of lump crabmeat because it was significantly less expensive. It didn't seem to make a huge difference. We left out the parsley all-together because Jake and Bad don't really like it. Not a big deal.
Sara was still on call and lamenting the fact of not being able to have a glass of wine with us. Jake and I had Sauvignon Blanc with dinner, a good match for this dish. Bad had her usual rum and coke, also a good match, I'm sure.
Dinner conversation, we all agreed, would not be shared with the general public, not even with the Diaryland public. There are some mysteries we like to keep to ourselves. (Trust me, you'd rather we kept some things to ourselves, too.)
After dinner Sara and Bad went next door. Jake and I slept at our house. We played around a bit but fell asleep pretty quickly. I always enjoy the opportunity to sleep next to Jake. Sleeping with someone is a very intimate experience. It can be a strong connection. I have never been a cuddling sleeper until I started occasionally sleeping with Jake. We usually fall asleep snuggled into each other. Most nights, no matter who I'm sleeping with, I wake up several times a night, and sometimes I have trouble going back to sleep. But last night when I woke up for the second time and lay on my back looking at the dark ceiling in frustration, I realized that there was a cuddly body lying next to me on her side ready to spoon. She was asleep, but when I spooned in behind her and wrapped my arm around her, she hugged my arm into her and I fell right to sleep. She has some kind of magic.
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