So tonight I finally got around to making one of my favorites. It is a simple smoked salmon pasta dish that I make several times a year. Since there are only two of us I usually freeze the rest and eat on it as time goes by. Luckily for me this also happens to be the same dish that garnered a zero in the FNG TD:
This time around I didn't have time for the fancy setup and the random angler beer. Then again, I now suspect that all you Jayhawk haters are the reason I got a zero before :tsk:. Anyway, as I reviewed my previous entry I found a double bonus. It seems that Al Czervik really loved it the first time around as evidenced
here:
Colonel this looks just like a dish I had last weekend that was absolutely fantastic. YUM!
and
here:
Please do put together the thread/description... I'd love to add it to our favorites tab! I would have already burst your bubble if I was paying better attention to the entries. Alas I have no more votes to cast.
So, for obvious reasons this shall be an entry into Al's Birthday suit Throwdown. Obviously this is a guaranteed winner if the birthday boy himself loves it. He even offered to burst my bubble, whatever that means NTTAWWT :tsk: Maybe not, but it was finally a chance to share this simple dish so Al could cook it in some upcoming TD and win with it.
So I started out with a simple grocery list: A pound of farfalle pasta, some cooking wine, a little EVOO, a jar of roasted red pepper alfredo sauce (yeah, I went all out), some peppers, peas, onions, mushrooms and such. In the middle is some fancy crab meat, literally :tsk:. When I went to the grocery store I didn't realize that the second biggest thing to cook on Christmas after rib roast was real crab meat and to my surprise they were out. I thought about checking another store but it was far and it too was surely affected by this rush for crab meat. Oh yeah, I also pulled out a couple salmon filets I smoked just the other month :roll:
So, we start with all the chopped peppers, mushrooms and onions in a sauce pan with a little EVOO. Not really caramelizing, just cooking until they are softened.
As it was going I decided to add some garlic because, well, I like garlic.
Soon the peppers were nice and soft.
Then add exactly 3 glugs of cooking wine and let it regain a little heat.
Once the temp comes back up a little, add the meat. I made a slight mistake at this point as I left the meat on the heat a little too long and it became more mush than flaked salmon. It was still good but just didn't retain its chunkiness.
Oh yeah, the peas go in now too. Now, you have two options. If I was cooking in a bigger pan I could have added the sauce here but instead I removed it from the heat and waited patiently for the pasta to cook....
(Notice the watched pot is actually boiling :shocked
Once the pasta is done and drained, in goes the meat and veggie mix followed by the alfredo sauce.
As I mentioned, the salmon "cooked" a little too much and I was a little rough with it so it ended up breaking down a bit more than I would have liked. In the end, though, it came out still pretty good and easily good enough for Mongo :becky:
