In Chicago, people refer to the subway system as the "L". Today, I did not take the L to work, but I sure took an L.
Let's start from the beginning. I found myself at Trader Joe's after work, wondering what to make for dinner, when I glanced at a bag with various frozen pieces of seafood - shrimp, scallops, and calamari rings. I wasn't sure what I would do with it, but eight bucks for a pound of seafood seemed worth a shot. Three minutes of Google-fu later, I found my recipe: Seafood Pasta with Tuscan Hot Oil.
I won't sugarcoat this. Tonight's dinner was a hot mess. It was tasty, and the end result looked damn fine, but the process itself was chaotic, messy, and confusing. I'm learning to thrive, smile, and laugh off the craziness. Let's walk through what went wrong.
Step 0: Finely chop a medium-sized onion and mince a clove of garlic. I actually forgot to buy the onion, and chose to use half a head of garlic instead of a single clove. I managed to mince it finely without chopping off any fingers, which was a plus.
Step 1: Combine olive oil with parsley, crushed red pepper, and sea salt. The only real issue here was that I forgot to add the parsley at this stage.
Step 2: The fun begins. I heated up some olive oil in a skillet and added the minced garlic. I had something good going. So what if I was supposed to add an onion? You can't cry if the onion isn't there.
At this stage, I was supposed to add a can of tomato sauce to the skillet. The only problem: I hadn't bought a can opener. So I took my pocketknife, the one tool I had that could do the trick, and proceeded to stab a can of tomato paste for the next three minutes. After a few dents, I pried a larger hole using a spoon, and managed to get a sizeable gap such that I could pour the tomato paste into the pan. So all that was left was to add the tomato sauce, then let that boil. I got to work on the pasta (in a separate pot), and once everything started boiling, I added the seafood (and the parsley from step 1) to the skillet.
"Bigger is better" is the unofficial motto of most Texans. The simple fact is that a bigger skillet would have been able to better contain a boiling-to-the-brim mix of garlic, hot oil, and tomato sauce. The stovetop was covered in spots of hot oil and tomato sauce. Our kitchen towel turned red, along with the bottom half of my shirt.
The rest of the story is pretty straightforward. Once the pasta was done, I drained it thoroughly and added in all of the sauce. The end result was beautiful and delicious (apologies for the steam in the camera lens in the plate shot).
If I've learned one thing, it's that it's okay to not know what's going on, and for things to not be proceeding according to plan. Just laugh it off, crank up the music, and visualize the goal.