Best Cooking and Reusing

Sorry for not having felt very posty recently.  I'll try to fix that.

I would like to show you some things I've been cooking.

Christmas weekend I finally tried a recipe from Lucky Peach #1 that I had been curious about since July '11: curry cavatelli with Jamaican-spiced beef (or that's the best way I can described it).  I cheated with a few things from the recipe, I wasn't going to kill myself trying to find Goat's milk ricotta.  

The curry cavatelli left an abundance of leftovers which were used in a variety of subsequent dishes, such as a spaghetti curry-carbonara of sorts I whipped up one evening.  I liked how the pecorino makes the egg yolk look like it's part of a sunny side-up egg. 

The curried-beef also played a row in an ambitious egg sandwich I suppered on one night.

On the last Sunday of the year I nearly killed myself with chili-fumes trying this recipe from April Bloomfield's cookbook out for a Thai-styled steak and watercress salad.  You pound chili peppers into the steak before you cook it, peppers that'll release clouds of basically pepper spray into your little apartment kitchen, no matter how carefully you tried to prevent that very thing from happening.

One of the main draws of that recipe was the thought of using the leftovers for a sandwich, which I did.  And it was wonderful.

Then on New Year's day it was time for traditional ricotta cavatelli, this time with tomato sauce instead of the typical browned sage butter.

A few nights later, my ultimate final cavatelli leftover dish: ricotta cavatelli with the remainder of the curry beef and a poached egg.  This was a winner.

One last effort: Monday night I made this version of chicken tikka masala my sister has a famous recipe for.  Have you ever been to someone's house and had weeknight dinner there and they serve you one of the family-favorite dishes, something they'll eat any old night?  And then you find yourself having maybe four helpings of this staple dish of their's because it's just treating you so right?  That's my experience with my sister's chicken tikka masala.  Note to self: Next time, less cinnamon, more jalepenos. 

I served it on bread because once I had Indian food at M Wells served on bread and I really liked it that way.  (See second photo below for example).

Example:

Okay, that's what I've been cooking and eating.  Right now I have a cannelleni stew simmering on the stove.  I love a nice white bean stew!

And guess what, time has passed and the stew has been cooked and partially eaten.  Tonight's special touches: Used bacon fat instead of olive oil for cooking the vegetables at the beginning.  Used chicken broth for stock . . . think I prefer vegetable stock, or leftover ramen broth.  Just experimenting and learning and growing, that's all.