This was my first actually cooking week for my blogging project. It was a lot more stressful than I thought it would be. I have been breaking down my weeks by meals. This week I focused on pasta. At the beginning of the week, the first thing I did was decide on the recipe I would be trying. I have really been liking The Pioneer Woman website, and after searching for “easy pasta recipes”, a few websites had her pasta on their list. It felt like fate. I decided that I would make Pasta with Tomato Cream Sauce. After I decided on the recipe, I thought the best thing to do was to look up the history of pasta. I can’t believe how much there is to know about pasta. I always thought that pasta originated in Italy, but with my research, I learned that they were making noodles and different types of pasta dishes in Asia, way before it made its way to Europe. Being Italian, this felt like a tiny dagger that pasta wasn’t an original Italian dish, but my hope was restored learning that Italians put their own twist to noodle making and how they cooked the noodles to make it unique to them. I also knew about dried and fresh pasta, since my grandfather used to make his own noodles, but I also learned some new facts. I never knew about why the texture of the noodle was important, but I found out it helps keep the sauce on the noodles with some small abrasions. Smooth noodles don’t hold sauce as well.
Things I learned about blogging:
I’m still working on learning about formatting images once they are inserted in my post. My images would look one way in the writing post page, but the formatting would be off in the actual blog post once it was published. I had to play around and move the images quite a bit. I also struggled getting photos from my iphone onto my computer to use for my blog posts. My jpegs came out huge and it was hard for me to edit them. I ended up making some images into a slide show (an option for selecting more than one image from media content) that made the photos a little smaller. I’m going to keep doing my homework on this though.
So many things didn’t go my way this week! Haha
We learned the hard way not to always trust brands. I bought parmesan cheese (since the recipe called for grated cheese) from Everyday Essentials. I have bought this brand before because I honestly can’t tell the difference with this and the more expensive brands. I opened it and had a few pinches to eat. When it came time to add the cheese, I noticed a piece of grey looking mold on a piece of the cheese. It was tiny, but I still was grossed out. I shook the cheese container around to see the whole middle section was COVERED in greenish blue mold. I looked it up to see if people could still eat cheese with mold on it. I found out that you can still have the cheese and just cut off the moldy parts on hard cheeses like parmesan. Since the cheese was already shredded, the pieces were so small, and I was too grossed out to use any of it in the dish. Since I was almost done with the pasta, I wasn’t going to run to the store for one ingredient. I made it without the parmesan.
LESSON I LEARNED: Check all of your ingredients before starting a meal to make sure everything can be used. I also learned to keep in mind the measurements of things. If a dish is going to make a lot of servings, it’s a good idea to use bigger pots/pans. My pan was overflowing with sauce, and it took forever to cook. For next time, I will use a bigger pan. You live and learn!
Things I did this week:
Jeanna's Blog 