Deep Fried Ice Cream, a photo by Pastarella Maker on Flickr.

Deep fried French Vanilla ice cream, served with a bit of Nutella for good measure.

Now THIS is what you serve for dessert on your anniversary if you intend to stay happily married for another year, kids. 😀

[Recipe via ZoomYummy.com] Addendum: I used smashed up kamut cereal for the coating because I don’t like or eat Corn Flakes. I’m sort of a snob like that. Heh.

For some, cooking pasta perfectly becomes an ordeal. One frought with perspiration and needless worry. And maybe some frustration thrown around for good measure. Pasta is easy to learn how to cook perfectly, however. Once you learn how, you’ll ace it every time. Let the great folks over at Cook’s Illustrated tell you how!

After the water comes to a full roiling boil, add salt (a generous 1 1/2 teaspoons per half pound of pasta; most of the salt will go down the drain with the cooking water) and then the pasta. Stir several times to separate the strands and, if necessary, bend long noodles with tongs to submerge them quickly.

Pasta Salad & Fish, a photo by Pastarella Maker on Flickr.

The other night I decided fish topped with black bean-corn salsa would be on that night’s dinner menu, but I only had a vague idea of what I’d use as sides to complete this meal. One of my ideas was to do a play on this Everyday Food Broccoli, Chickpea and Cherry Tomato salad since DH’s not fond of chickpeas. The other was going to be chunks of grilled baguette with rubbed garlic and lightly buttered. Nice, right?

Pasta Salad, a photo by Pastarella Maker on Flickr.

By the time the end of yesterday rolled around, DH decided he needed to stay late so he was going to drop me off at home so I could hit the grocery store across the street before starting dinner. By the time I got going, I decided I would sub out the chickpeas for slices of cukes from my FIL’s garden. I prepped it all and stored it in the fridge to assemble once DH finally got home.

He worked longer than I thought, but was as it turns out, he arrived home five minutes before the fish was to come out of the oven, so I jumped up and started the dressing for the side salad and to prep the bread for the oven toasting.

In my haste, I forgot all about the cuke slices as well as the bread chunks all together. Whoops. Oh, well. This side salad turned out beautifully anyway with its lovely vinaigrette taste that made both of us think of summer time picnics where the coleslaw was a huge draw. So nostalgic. The meal, as it was, turned out to be so filling, the MIA bread chunks weren’t missed at all.

Since there is only two of us, and I had to use up all of my broccoli in one go, I ended up with a lot of leftover salad. Without missing a beat, I took out the bowl of cooked tubetti pasta from the fridge I was going to use in a casserole or frittata on the weekend, and made another batch of the dressing to create a gorgeous and very satisfying cold (or room temperature) summer pasta salad.

This will be a perfect companion to any other meat dish I make for dinner this long weekend, or simply on its own in a bowl for a quick, filling lunch. The fiber content in this one salad alone blows me away. So, if you need to bulk up your fiber intake for heath concerns, give this salad a go!

[Recipe via MSL’s Everyday Food]