There’s been such great weather lately, and with all the daylight it makes for great pictures. I made a nice simple pasta dish for lunch today, composed of

• onion
• mushrooms
• spicy katamala olives
• Classico sweet basil marinara
• rigatoni
• baby spinach
• cayenne pepper
• table cream

Sauteeing Onion, Mushrooms and Olives

Sauteeing the onions and mushrooms and then adding the olives, sauce and table cream creates a creamy chunky concoction that can be placed on top of some rigatoni and baby spinach.

Spicy Rigatoni

The mid-day lightining makes for wonderful naturally lit pictures that can be taken at a low ISO setting. It’s sad to know that I won’t have this type of lighting once I start working from 9-5… Gotta pick up a flash once I get the income…

It’s pretty hard getting by as a University student living away from home. You never have the tools or ingredients that you need to get things done, especially when it comes to cooking and baking.

Yesterday, I finally obtained some Baileys, so that I could make some more sugar cookies to share with everyone on my floor, but realised I didn’t have a electric mixer or even batter. After asking about 5 random people in our building, I still came up empty :(.

Butternut Squash Star Ravioli

Today, I still had the incredible craving to make something, so I googled up a recipe for fresh pasta and grabbed some leftover baked butternut squash in the fridge.

No mixing bowl? Use a plastic tub for washing rice.

No blender? Puree with a spoon/knife.

No pastry wheel? Use a cookie cutter. It’s a much interesting shape than cutting straight lines with a knife. And takes advantage of the cookie cutter I bought recently.

No rolling pin? (wait for it…) Use a mug or a cup. This worked fairly well for the pastry dough that I made a few weeks ago.

Probably due to my inability to mix the ingredients properly, I was left with a tough dough and it was incredibly difficult to flatten out, especially without the right tools. It took me about an hour just to make these 4 pieces of ravioli, I just gave up after that and sliced them up into thick pieces of fettuccine.

Butternut Squash Star Ravioli

I cooked them up and lightly coated them in a butter thyme sauce. The pasta dough itself was really thick and tough, but the centre was still light, sweet and creamy. At least they came out looking great =) .

Sorry, now that I don’t have anymore entries in queue, I’ve lost the urgency to finish posting these.

Common in presentations for Belgian endives, they can be used as “boats” or little bowls to place food on. As well as steaming the endives, I took a small bundle of enoki mushroom, dipped in egg spiced with some cumin, tumeric and salt. Once the mushrooms have been dipped, I shallow fried them so that the egg cooked, leaving the appearance that the mushrooms were wrapped in an egg blanket.

Endive Boats

Before dinner, on my way home I decided to drop by Whole Foods in Yorkville one of the only two Whole Foods in Ontario. Whole Foods is a large chain of supermarkets from the US, and is always seen on the tv show Top Chef, which is where I heard about the store. I grabbed some Gruyère and Blue Haze cheese as well as some fresh lemon & pepper fettucini.

The second I got home, I set the pot to boil and prepared some fresh alfredo sauce, substituting some of the Parmesan with Gruyère and Blue Haze. Throwing in some sage and portobello mushrooms. It was, the most delicious dish I had ever made.

Fettuccine Alfredo

Fettuccine Alfredo