quick and easy Archives - hello kelinda

July 30, 2018

Quick Tuna Pasta (or Friendship Tuna Pasta, if you ask Katie)

Summers are hot. Summers in a house with no air conditioning are even hotter. To keep temperatures inside from rising past Real Sweaty and straight into Living on the Sun, I try to keep my stove time as short as possible when cooking anything. So when my friend Katie found a recipe for a quick pasta dinner that incorporated two of my favorite things — (1) tinned fish and (2) not being on fire — I immediately knew this was something I’d have to break out every summer.

All the things that go into the pasta are thrown into one bowl, and get this: it is “cooked” by placing that bowl on top of the pot of water while the pasta boils. The heat from the boiling water is enough to warm everything through so that you only need to use one stove burner and the stove only needs to be on as long as it takes to cook your spaghetti.

AmyK

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January 22, 2015

Dry-Fried Spicy Long Beans

I’m back! It turns out that I’m like a cat; I need to lie out and charge in a sunbeam if I’m expected to do anything at all for the remainder of the day. And well, the sun skidattles from the sky by 4pm this time of the year here, so I haven’t been doing much cooking for the past few months. Yikes. But now that it’s somewhat bright when I leave the office — even if it instantly becomes pitch black by the time I reach my front door — I can feel the desire to throw down in the kitchen returning to the frozen cockles of my heart. Hooray!

This weekend’s dinner gathering hosted by my friends Sara and Adrian was the perfect push to fire up the stove again. And what better on a cold Sunday night than something green and spicy?

AmyK

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September 10, 2014

Broccoli and Pecorino Pasta

This past weekend was blazingly hot, like the departing summer sun was leaning in to give Seattle a big ol’ hug before it inevitably ignores us for the fall and winter. As a result, the ambient temperature of my apartment reached levels that were previously only recorded inside of active volcanoes.

And that’s where I ran into this little dilemma — the last thing I wanted to do was turn on my stove, but the only thing in the world I wanted to eat was pasta. That’s how my mind works, folks, like the time I decided to walk in a blizzard because I wanted ice cream. Sigh. Simmering a nice red sauce on the stove was out of the question, but what can be done instead? This can be done instead.

I found this recipe on Epicurious years ago, and it’s something I find myself making over and over again. It’s so simple and easy, and best of all, requires minimal stove time. Just long enough to boil whatever pasta suits your fancy plus a minute more for the broccoli to get all nice and soft, et voilà — dinner is served.

AmyK

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August 25, 2014

Challah French Toast

I admittedly have not really been cooking these past two weeks, and I don’t even have a good reason for it. It’s like I had suddenly reverted back to my college self, having nothing but ramen and instant miso soup for dinner and playing a lot of bad acoustic guitar. (You guys should hear my rendition of “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” it’s excellent. And by “excellent,” I do mean “really awful.”)

But yesterday, I broke the streak by making a monstrous loaf of challah.

Breakfast will always be my favorite meal of the day, though I rarely eat it during actual designated breakfast hours (TOO EARLY, PEOPLE). The food served before noon is so delightfully decadent and absurd; we don’t bat an eye to crispy pieces of fatty bacon, or to stacks of flat cakes smothered in syrup. It’s breakfast, after all, the most important meal of the day.

AmyK

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