Friday open thread: comfort food
Jan. 21st, 2022 01:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Edited to add that I feel this post would fit the criteria of today's ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge: In your own space, interact with someone.
This generally isn't much of a problem for me — I try to post at least one comment or reply every day, and that's certainly the case today. However, it occurred to me that this post might be a good opportunity for people to ease their way into commenting, or interacting with others (it doesn't have to be me! you could reply to someone else's comment!) in a hopefully low-pressure context. My Friday open threads are intended to be the ultimate in low-pressure posting: each week I ask a question, answer it, and open up a space for others to answer too. The questions are generally fairly low pressure topics, although of course that is somewhat subjective. So ... feel free to jump in! Consider this post license to comment if you've never commented before, or to interact with perfect strangers. (Or don't: the whole point is that it's meant to be low pressure!)
And we're back for another round of the Friday open thread. This time, my question is a simple one: what is your favourite comfort food?
I have a lot of things that would fit this definition — basically anything that is warm, flavourful, and takes a long time but not a lot of effort to cook (so soups, stews, slow-cooked curries, etc) is comforting to me. And my stepmother introduced me years ago to the healing powers of congee, and ever since I've cooked it when I have a cold. But really, there's one dish above all others that I turn to for comfort: Marcella Hazan's pasta with tuna sauce. This has been a staple in my family since before I was born — my parents encountered Hazan's cookbooks when they lived in New York in the 1980s, and when they returned to Australia they taught every other adult member of my family how to cook it. There are photos of me as a baby with this dish smeared all over my face and upper body. I've been cooking it myself since I was first allowed to be solo in the kitchen — so probably since I was about ten or eleven years old — and I helped my mother, father, and various other relatives cook it many years before that. (We are a family that has always encouraged children to be active observers and participants in the kitchen, and it's generally resulted in said children growing into confident cooks and adventurous eaters, not that this dish is 'adventurous' by any stretch of the imagination.)
I've moved house around fifteen times in my adult life, and this dish is always the first thing I cook in a new kitchen.
Its beauty is its simplicity: it has only five ingredients (plus salt, pepper and olive oil), and it can easily be doubled to serve four, or be saved as leftovers to serve one person over two days (although I'd generally cook new pasta fresh on the second day rather than reheating old pasta, which I find disgusting). And it takes about five minutes to prepare and fifteen minutes to cook.
Pasta with tuna sauce (serves 2)
2 cloves garlic, finely diced (increase if you prefer more garlic)
bunch flatleaf parsley, finely chopped (the curly kind can be used instead, or dried parsley)
1 400g tin tomatoes
1 tin/jar of tuna (I prefer the kind in oil, and I then use the oil to fry the ingredients, but tuna in brine or water would work fine)
Enough pasta to serve the required number of people
Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan. Once the pan is hot, add the diced garlic and fry until golden, then add the chopped parsley, and fry for a minute. (If the pan is really hot, the parsley may jump around, so I sometimes remove the pan from the heat at this point.) Add the tin of tomatoes and reduce heat to a medium simmer. Cook until the tomatoes are a good consistency — you shouldn't see much liquid in the pan — generally for about 10 minutes. Add the tuna, breaking it up and spreading it around the pan so that all ingredients are well mixed together. It's okay if a bit of oil from the tin gets added to the sauce at this point. Once the tuna has been heated up, remove the pan from the heat and combine with the pasta to serve. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
(I am assuming everyone knows how to cook pasta, so have not included this in the recipe!).
What are your comfort foods?
snowflake_challenge: In your own space, interact with someone.This generally isn't much of a problem for me — I try to post at least one comment or reply every day, and that's certainly the case today. However, it occurred to me that this post might be a good opportunity for people to ease their way into commenting, or interacting with others (it doesn't have to be me! you could reply to someone else's comment!) in a hopefully low-pressure context. My Friday open threads are intended to be the ultimate in low-pressure posting: each week I ask a question, answer it, and open up a space for others to answer too. The questions are generally fairly low pressure topics, although of course that is somewhat subjective. So ... feel free to jump in! Consider this post license to comment if you've never commented before, or to interact with perfect strangers. (Or don't: the whole point is that it's meant to be low pressure!)
And we're back for another round of the Friday open thread. This time, my question is a simple one: what is your favourite comfort food?
I have a lot of things that would fit this definition — basically anything that is warm, flavourful, and takes a long time but not a lot of effort to cook (so soups, stews, slow-cooked curries, etc) is comforting to me. And my stepmother introduced me years ago to the healing powers of congee, and ever since I've cooked it when I have a cold. But really, there's one dish above all others that I turn to for comfort: Marcella Hazan's pasta with tuna sauce. This has been a staple in my family since before I was born — my parents encountered Hazan's cookbooks when they lived in New York in the 1980s, and when they returned to Australia they taught every other adult member of my family how to cook it. There are photos of me as a baby with this dish smeared all over my face and upper body. I've been cooking it myself since I was first allowed to be solo in the kitchen — so probably since I was about ten or eleven years old — and I helped my mother, father, and various other relatives cook it many years before that. (We are a family that has always encouraged children to be active observers and participants in the kitchen, and it's generally resulted in said children growing into confident cooks and adventurous eaters, not that this dish is 'adventurous' by any stretch of the imagination.)
I've moved house around fifteen times in my adult life, and this dish is always the first thing I cook in a new kitchen.
Its beauty is its simplicity: it has only five ingredients (plus salt, pepper and olive oil), and it can easily be doubled to serve four, or be saved as leftovers to serve one person over two days (although I'd generally cook new pasta fresh on the second day rather than reheating old pasta, which I find disgusting). And it takes about five minutes to prepare and fifteen minutes to cook.
Pasta with tuna sauce (serves 2)
2 cloves garlic, finely diced (increase if you prefer more garlic)
bunch flatleaf parsley, finely chopped (the curly kind can be used instead, or dried parsley)
1 400g tin tomatoes
1 tin/jar of tuna (I prefer the kind in oil, and I then use the oil to fry the ingredients, but tuna in brine or water would work fine)
Enough pasta to serve the required number of people
Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan. Once the pan is hot, add the diced garlic and fry until golden, then add the chopped parsley, and fry for a minute. (If the pan is really hot, the parsley may jump around, so I sometimes remove the pan from the heat at this point.) Add the tin of tomatoes and reduce heat to a medium simmer. Cook until the tomatoes are a good consistency — you shouldn't see much liquid in the pan — generally for about 10 minutes. Add the tuna, breaking it up and spreading it around the pan so that all ingredients are well mixed together. It's okay if a bit of oil from the tin gets added to the sauce at this point. Once the tuna has been heated up, remove the pan from the heat and combine with the pasta to serve. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
(I am assuming everyone knows how to cook pasta, so have not included this in the recipe!).
What are your comfort foods?
no subject
Date: 2022-01-22 02:28 pm (UTC)Thanks for the tip on reheating pasta — I'll give it a try!
no subject
Date: 2022-01-22 03:36 pm (UTC)I hope the pasta trick works for you! I should have mentioned that having a colander helps, as I just set that in the pot or bowl so I can get the pasta out without any fuss.