Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

I don't normally buy dipping sauces for my chips, but this was on sale recently, so I picked it up, only to realize I didn't have tortilla chips at home. Instead we experimented a bit and found it great as a spread. It has bold flavour in even just a little bit of sauce. The next step was to try it with pasta and similar noodles, and it turned out wonderfully. The dip is already quite tasty, and we found that just a tablespoon was very generous for a bowl of pasta. But what really made this a winning pasta sauce was the sticky consistency. It might seem somewhat on the watery side, but the stickiness means that it easily coats the pasta and doesn't just drip off and end up at the bottom of your dish. Mixed well, every bite of pasta will have this delicious sauce. For a very simple meal, we boiled some pasta, mixed this sauce in, and accompanied it with some sausage chunks. We also like a bit more spicy heat, so we first put a tablespoon of this sauce on our plate and sti...

There are many reasons to try to speed up cooking pasta. Maybe you're too impatient to stand around waiting for the pasta to boil properly and test it periodically. Maybe you like to step away and do something more productive while it's boiling but lose track of time. Whatever the reason, there's a lazier way to do it with less attention, at long as you remember to prep ahead of time. Then you can go straight to preparing the dish. In slide 1 you can see I'm soaking some dry pasta. The minimum time is around two (2) hours of soaking in cold/lukewarm tap water. Don't worry too much if you go overtime. If you completely forgot about it and went to sleep, don't freak out. Just drain the water and try to stir fry it gently in a non-stick pan. As long as it was swimming in water, it shouldn't all glue together. After draining the water, put some oil on them and gently mix/toss, so they don't melt together once they are in the frying pan. After two hours, yo...