Saturday, February 23, 2008

Pasta with cheese and chive bread

I'll be the first person to admit that I can be lazy. Ok, that I am lazy. But sometimes I can be lazy in particularly obtuse ways. Take this recipe for cheese and chive bread for instance.


It calls for the butter to be rubbed in to the flour using a food processor. Well, it doesn't say 'rubbed in' precisely, but I knew that's what they were talking about from back in my days of Tech Foods in high school. In a food processor, this would have taken all of five minutes right? Perfect for a lazy person. But here's the thing. I quite willingly spent about 20 minutes using the old fashioned bowl and wooden spoon method, not because I'm a tradionalist, or because we don't have a food processor in the house - we do, our housemate has a great one he never uses. No, it's because I was too lazy to a) clear a space on the bench for the thing, and b) put it all together, but mostly c) then have to wash all the itty bitty parts, instead of using a spoon and bowl I'd be getting dirty later in the recipe anyway. Yeah, it takes effort to be this slack.

Other than that, I followed the recipe pretty much spot on. While it was baking, I threw some leftover chopped chives in a pan with some chopped Australian garlic (the chinese lady at the fruit and veg shop said it was a lot stronger than normal garlic you get, and she's right... perfect for us, as now I only need two cloves instead of four) and some sliced green parts of leek, grabbed from a bag I'm saving for stock for next week's soup. Fried it up with some mince, added a tin of diced tomatoes, and half a jar of pasta sauce, and left that to simmer over low heat for about half an hour. Which was just long enough for me to boil up some water for pasta and do half the dishes. And for once, everything was ready together.


If I'd had had any leftovers of the sauce or bread (or the pasta with sauce mixed through for that matter) I could have frozen it, but the whole lot got demolished. I think I better make two loaves of that bread next time, as DP ate half the loaf by himself! The kids ate about half their slice each, though they both said it was yummy. But then Miss Two only had about three bites of her pasta, which she normally likes, and Master Three only finished his pasta for the promise of fruit salad (ok, tinned, I'll admit it, but what else can you do with a tin of fruit salad?)

The bread wasvery heavy, so maybe that was it. But it didn't feel it till you'd eaten it... it was just so light and crumbly, not at all dense. All in all, not a bad effort for a lazy, unmotivated Saturday.

1 comments:

Kristin said...

This sounds lovely. I haven't made cheese bread in ages, but i think i'll have a go at this one.

oh, and thanks for the link, too.