An idea, a website, a recipe

This is a bonus post since I haven't posted for a couple of weeks. You will be getting two posts this evening.

This week is truly a special week for me. First of all, I want to let you all know that my posts for the next two weeks will be different. During my time in NYC, I found a couple of really interesting pop-up restaurants and little places that blew my mind, so I'm going to talk about those. Now coming to this week. I just started an interesting website, and this week is inspired by that. The goal is to make cooking clean and ingredient-efficient. Therefore, our solution was to form a website that curates one-pot recipes, and allows you to filter through the recipes by what you have in your pantry. 

Now COMING TO THE FOOD. I was at my aunt's place, and I intended to cook some nice chicken pasta for them, but after rolling out the dough, I realised SHE DIDN'T HAVE MUSHROOMS OR CHICKEN. The only option was to find a new recipe, and I decided to look at my website for that. Immediately, I settled on an easy recipe - one-pot veggie pasta. I decided to combine that recipe with a basic aglio olio to create what you see above. 

When it comes to the pasta, I rolled it by hand. However, this recipe can be made without hand rolled pasta, and that actually ends up being low cleanup. I boiled the pasta first, drained it, and then used the same pot to make the aglio olio. Carrots, asparagus and some mushrooms with oil and some basic herbs and spices (sage, paprika, oregano, etc.), and then just put the boiled noodles in once the veggies were ready. Then a bit of parmesan and we were good to go. 

The point of this post is not to give you a complex recipe, but to give you a quick, easy recipe. To find recipes like this, you really should check out my site - Pasta4two. It allows you to make cooking easier and quicker. If you're using this website, all you need to do is think about the plating. But...if you still need help for plating, here's my two cents (I'm not an expert, nor do I claim to be one, so to you, this advice may actually be worth literally two cents.)

Firstly, when plating pasta, you want to create some height. If the pasta looks like it's just dropped in the bowl, it doesn't have the elegance. I'd recommend buying some pasta plates. Now you can either layer the pasta or spiral it. I actually don't know how to successfully spiral pasta, so I prefer to layer it. Especially with spaghetti or fettuccine, I would recommend draping the strands over themselves a few times so it almost looks like a cuboid. Then, garnishes are also important. Some sort of sauce circled around the pasta also tends to look good, and some herbs and grated parmesan on the top for garnish. 

I didn't do any of this, more because I just didn't have the bandwidth that day, but I will (once I get home) try to do this at some point. 

Also, one of the next two weeks' posts will be (in my opinion) one of the most interesting posts I could dream of, so stay ready for the next couple of weeks.