Hello gourmets and food lovers, but especially the fans of some tasty pasta! š
This is my first, but definitely not the last post, in the Foodies Bee Hive community which to be honest I got my eyes on for a long while now but somehow I always postponed the moment to write down an article here.
Being my first post here, I'll begin by saying that I discovered my passion for cooking around 5 years ago during my college years. Back then I was mainly focusing on cooking sweets but slowly I started trying all kinds of recipes found online and have some of them adjusted to my taste because I do have lots of ingredients that I'm not a fan of and it's always nice to leave your own mark on something you are cooking.
Anyway, even if I gathered quite a few meals I cooked lately, I'll begin with the most recent one which was nothing else but pasta. Oh, and I'll keep this kind of posts for Sundays since I consider as being the perfect day to cook and literally eat anything you want. Hence why "Tasty Sunday" is the name of my cooking recipes series. š
- spaghetti 500 gr
- tomato sauce 330 gr
- cheese 300 gr
- ham 400 gr
- 10-15 garlic cloves
- a pinch of salt
- optional: wine, pepper, salt, mushrooms
I started by adding water to a big pot that I have left on fire until there started to be created small bubbles around the pot's walls and then added a pinch of salt.
I haven't added the pinch of salt from the beginning because from what I understood this makes the water boil harder so I simply waited a few more minutes until the water warmed up.
As soon as the water boiled I added the spaghetti which I left inside for 9 minutes as it was indicated on the package of the product.
You can add any pasta you want but you should pay attention to the package because every form has its own recommended time for boiling.
While the spaghetti was boiling, I started preparing the rest of the elements such as cutting in small pieces a few garlic cloves and grate the ham and cheese.
I decided to have the ham and cheese in separate bowls because I will keep some of the cheese for decorating the food at the end and not implement the whole composition in the sauce.
Meanwhile, the pasta was already ready so I used a strainer to drain all the water from the pot. I used to rinse the pasta after boiling but recently I found out that it's one of the common mistakes people do while cooking this kind of food because if you rinse the composition you will literally remove all the nutrients and the specific taste of pasta.
So just get rid of the water and let the pasta rest until the sauce is ready and you can add them too.
When it comes to creating the sauce, there are literally endless things you can try with as many ingredients you like because pasta is one of the meals that I find very easy to be adapted to each person's preferences.
I am not a fan of cold cuts and it's been a long while since I stopped eating them but somehow I felt the need of having some meat in the pasta and that's why I ended up having some of this in my sauce.
So I started by cooking it over low heat for a few minutes until the ham was no longer raw.
As soon as the ham was ready, I added the tomato sauce which already had wine in its composition, along with the slices of garlic and some dried spices that I cooked for 7 minutes as it was indicated on the sauce jar.
You can add here some wine if you want or even cook the mushrooms along with the ham if you are looking for a lot more ingredients in your pasta. Just play with the ingredients you enjoy eating the most and you find them suitable to become part of the pasta.
As soon as the sauce was cooked, I added half of the cheese composition to make the sauce less liquid. This is a personal preference while I've seen many people adding the cheese over the hot pasta when being served instead of having it directly in the sauce.
After the cheese melts, you can add the pasta and mix everything together. There is a rule that I forgot to respect, namely to have the same amount of sauce with this of the pasta, which should be 500 gr. However, if you don't mind spending a little bit more time mixing everything until the sauce is well incorporated into the pasta, you can still have the same results at the end. You can also consider adding some of the water in which the pasta was cooked. š
You can easily appreciate the time when the pasta is cooked and ready to be served by checking the colour of the spaghetti that should follow the sauce's colour and have all the other elements like ham and cheese between them and not only here and there.
If you love cheese, you can try and add more types of this both in the sauce and when decorating the food, as well as have bacon along with the ham that is already part of the dish.
But keep in mind that pasta is usually very rich in calories and you can easily make everything become heavy for your stomach if there are too many fats.
Preparing + cooking time: 30 mins
Don't forget to check out the rest of my posts too, from travelling to gaming, from photography to film reviews and more! ā¤ļø
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