Carbonara

Frozen dinners. They are a bad habit dating back to my early days of being on my own. Stouffer's makes it so easy for you that there are dishes I've only eaten as frozen tv dinners. It's long past the time I should cook them for myself. Chicken Carbonara is one of those dishes.

Last night I cooked "Pasta Carbonara, Roman Style" from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines. It was a learning experience. The 1% milk I prefer made the sauce not smooth and creamy, as the recipe suggested, but a bunch of cheese particles suspended in butter solution. Not very appealing, visually, but I was impressed at how the taste matched the Chicken Carbonara I'm familiar with. I guess that's the important thing, but as I am usually cooking for one, presentation is one of those things that gets tossed out the window first. I want food to taste good. If it looks pretty, that's just gravy. So to speak.

Sauced

After losing a couple of days due to birding, ridiculously long baseball games and a relative lack of exciting food adventures, I'm back. Yesterday I tried making Maki's essence of Japanese flavor in a bottle. After combining the ingredients, I reduced them down a little more than the recipe intended (oops), so I have an extremely concentrated form of it. Better luck next time, but in the meantime I can use what I have. The kitchen smelled really good while it was cooking, too.

While in a sauce vein, I should note that Sunday night I did the weekly boiling of the master sauce. It's starting to get a little intense in flavor, so I probably need to cook something else in it and replenish the ingredients. I just started it a couple of weeks ago. I used the "Looing Sauce" recipe in the late lamented Frugal Gourmet's The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines. That recipe uses both light soy and mushroom soy, which makes a very rich sauce - a little too rich, I think. As I keep the master sauce going, I'll probably tweak it by increasing the amount of light soy when I replenish it.