Reusing ingredients, balancing flavors, and failing in the kitchen!



Classes have just started for me and thankfully this is my last semester. Due to this expect a lot less fancy “recipes” and more tips and tricks as I try to quickly make and devour food to save time. In particular I plan to show how I food prep for the week, how to keep the food fresh and exciting over the week, how to eat semi-healthy on a budget, and other kitchen essentials for wherever you live. Enough with the service announcement, on to the cooking!

You will notice in this recipe that I reuse some ingredients from the last post. This was planned and it is something you should always plan to do as well! The worst feeling (especially as a poor college student) is having to throw away a lot of fresh food you bought in bulk because you didn’t use it in time. The easy way to get around this is to buy frozen foods instead of fresh. Most of the time frozen is relatively cheap and lasts a lot longer than fresh items. Since you can’t beat the taste of fresh produce and meat, the best thing you can do is buying fresh and cooking soon. You should plan several meals ahead of time which overlap in the ingredients they use. In my case, I planned on cooking pasta once I bought it at the Strip District, then saw an amazing deal on spicy Italian sausage which led me to build a bolognese version of the pasta dish I planned.

Now those of you who read my last post might be thinking, “pumpkin pasta with spicy sausage?”, and you would be correct! In fact it wasn’t that great… edible maybe but not as good as my previous recipe. But it serves a good teaching purpose so I will still share it with you and then say what went wrong.

Pumpkin Linguine with Spicy Italian Sausage Bolognese

Ingredients

  • Any pasta (I chose, but do not recommend, fresh pumpkin linguine)
  • Tomato sauce (not pasta sauce!)
  • Parsley*
  • Basil*
  • Garlic (fresh, powder, or even salt is fine)
  • Olive oil
  • Spicy Italian sausage (ground or diced very finely)
  • Parmesan cheese or any other salty cheese

*You can simply substitute Italian seasoning if you don’t have fresh herbs

The Sauce

Any good tomato sauce is going to take a while to cook but luckily it is easy to get going. Saute the garlic and Italian sausage until almost done. You can test this by taking a piece of the sausage and opening it to confirm its still a bit pink inside. Then add these ingredients plus the tomato sauce, herbs, and any spices you would like into a pot and simmer. I simmered mine for about an hour on low heat but the longer you simmer the better it will turn out. If you see the sauce getting too thick you should add some water. Of course, if you would like to add onion, mushrooms, or anything else to the sauce then feel free! Just make sure to saute your ingredients before adding the tomato sauce.

The Pasta

Pretty simple. With fresh pasta you only need to cook it for a few minutes until it is ready. With packaged pasta just follow the steps on the box.

Once the pasta is almost done you can put a good final touch on it by putting each serving in a pan with some of the pasta water and adding your bolognese. Cooking the pasta in the sauce will make it absorb all of those meaty and herby flavors from the sauce. Or don’t do that, that’s cool too.

Cheese goes so well with pasta doesn't it?

What Went Wrong

So what went wrong you may ask? Well I didn’t properly balance the flavors I had going in this pasta. I thought balancing the slight sweetness of the pumpkin pasta with a spicy sausage sauce would work out well, but the pasta was not sweet enough and the sausage bolognese was simply too spicy. I also added a bit too much parsley in my sauce which enhanced the spiciness but also completely masked the flavor of the pasta. This is contrary to what I did with my previous pasta where the sauce was very light and herby which did not mask the flavor of the pasta too much, and the amount of herbs I used allowed the sweetness of the pasta to come out as well.

So whats the lesson here? Cooking is a game of balance and I failed at it. But how should you balance flavors? I highly recommend reading this article where the author explains all the different types of flavors and how best to balance and enhance them!