odzer's blog

Some days ago i have made a pasta dish. I was looking forward to using Penne but when I looked in my supplies I discovered I had only some spirali pasta. Oh well its not as if you can not use one or the other. So the thing about Pasta is that it is my instant noodles. I am not particularly fond of eating “maggi” type things so I just make a pasta whenever I feel the need to escape from cooking.It requires fairly less amount of work and it contains tomatoes which i am quite partial to. Extra flavouring comes from bay leaves, garlic, white onions, an occassional green chilli, pepper, basil and oregano.

Its always good to use good quality tomatoes when you do a tomato based pasta sauce. If you like you can also use a bit of tomato paste for a darker colour.

A lazy dinner

Tonight I was feeling lazy so I cooked Penne Regate for dinner. I did it with the usual Tomato sauce and had some Parmesan cheese on top at the end. I like eating pasta now and then but I do not usually cook Penne, its either spaghetti or fettuccine. I will be honest mostly I would rather use Penne in a salad or a casserole.

I would have loved a bit of decent mince so I could have done a bolognaise but it does not matter because its mostly the tomato sauce that I am after. They say tomato is a poor man’s red wine and since wine is indeed a pricey drink here I do not mind the extra lycopene. Tomatoes in the monsoon tend to be of a very poor quality and its perhaps the worst time to eat Tomatoes in India, I must say though that Indian tomatoes taste really very good.

The penne turned out to be quite nice and I will tell you the secret, MSG toss a bit of it most restaurants will do that anyway so will most of the packaged sauces, also add a bay leaf along with the mixed herbs. I am not averse to eating MSG because as a food additive it has been around for a long long time and its naturally found in things like mushrooms. In fact the taste is similar to certain stocks that contain meat. Now I am not saying food wont taste good if you do not have MSG but I don’t really see any problem in this particular additive. The Japanese and other Asians routinely have been using seaweeds to get this compound as a taste enhancer for years and they don’t seem to die that easily.Further all the alarming results that have ever been found in MSG have been after subject animals were directly injected with MSG, no effects were observed when it was given to them as a food additive. So basically I will sometimes toss in these things when I want a taste enhancement and I do not worry about it but I do not do it routinely. Sometimes I tend to use natural taste enhancers like shitake mushrooms, parmesan cheese, fish sauce, carrots or even tomatoes which all contain MSG naturally.

I have a few bushes of Basil growing in my verandah. So I decided to raid them and make some spaghetti for lunch today. It came out quite nicely. What I liked was the plentifulness and the flavourfulness of the herbs. Spaghetti is an interesting dish for me. It tells me a lot about the state of the world economy than anything else. Since the last two years the cost of Pasta seems to be rising in India. It also seems that the cost is rising a lot in Italy that is because more and more of it is being consumed in India and China. Suddenly Indians can now afford to eat things that they have never been eating in the past and now they seemed to have caused prices to spiral upwards in Italy where people are protesting. Pasta seems to be a staple as far as the Italians are concerned because they at least eat it once during the day. It seems to me sometimes that International trade can only be successful under two circumstances, either we do not trade at all or we integrate our economies more closely and have one single world currency and one single world market. However that is going to happen in the distant future. In the next 50 years or so what I foresee is the African Union, The European Union, Asean and Nafta as some super governments before eventual world integration. Countries are becoming irrelevant as times goes by and it is only the younger nations that talk of out dated concepts like “Sovereignty”. However until then let the world discover pasta and the joys that it brings.