Being wasteful
Bah, drunk again. I don't mean to make this some sort of running theme of posting blogs while I'm inebriated, but at the moment it feels like the best ideas are coming to me when I'm not thinking straight.
Once again, the reason for my slight intoxication is because there's some leftover wines at my place. No, a friend didn't leave it behind like last time - I finished that one off pretty quickly. This time, I bought this one myself. Why? Because I was told white wine was an ingredient in a good pasta sauce htat I oh so enjoyed.
If you haven't already figured-out from my food-related blog posts, I strive to make a lot of Italian dishes because I like Italian food. Oh 'like' is too weak a word for it: I've been to the same Italian restaurant for my birthday since my 21st, and when I was making travel plans for Melbourne for a friend's wedding and was told about Lygon St - a street lined with restaurants serving all manner of Mediterranean cuisine - I almost kissed my travel agent right then and there (oh nevermind that Lygon St is now in the news because of all those gang killings; that can all happen in the background while I'm chowing-down on some epic gnocchi dish for all I care).
Much like with my documenting of Pizza 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, I'm trying to do the same thing now with a white pasta sauce: create something which contains all the parts I love most about pastas based on white sauces. With Pizza 1.x, it was easy to list my goals because all of the things were based on very tangible parts With the pasta however, it's all a matter of taste.
I did however come across a pasta dish which approximated what I was after when I was at one of my favourite cafes one Friday lunch time, and so I asked one of the staff if they could maybe ask the chef to share with me the recipe so I could make something like that myself. She came back and relayed the words of the chef back to me: "...it's the same as your usual cream-and-bacon sauce, but with some white wine added."
Now I should've asked WHICH white wine they used, but because I'm not a wine connoisseur (holy crap I spelled that right while my head is swaying side-to-sode out of my rational control and in time to the music playing right now) and to my unsophisticated palette all white wine tastes like all other white wine and all red wine tastes like all other red wine - yet I can tell the difference between regular Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero... go figure - because the next time I went shopping I was planted in the middle of the wine section surrounded by more bottles of wine than there are stars in the sky, and without a damn clue as to which one to buy. So I picked one and hoped for the best.
I didn't hope hard enough.
The next time I tried my pasta sauce, I added the wine and, while it did add that little something that my normal sauces had been missing, it didn't add the right flavour, so now I'm stuck with this bottle of wine which I am now drinking down like water (and if my guitar buddy read that part right now she'd tell me off because she's trying to get me to slow-down my drinking since I still drink anything, alcohol included, like I do my Coke). I should really throw it out of just give it to somebody else who might actually enjoy it more than I, but there's another overriding part of myself that really hates being wasteful and throwing things out. So, down the gullet instead of down the bin it goes.
I don't know where it came from, but I really hate throwing things out or being wasteful. Back at my family's house my dad keeps a compost that helps fuel the garden he keeps in the back yard - I really like the idea of having our food scraps being put to good use. Also, they participate in the city's recycling program. The apartment building I'm in however, doesn't even participate in the recycling program, so every time I throw a piece of recyclable paper/plastic/glass into the massive bin at the side of the building I feel like I might as well eat a new-born baby for all the good I'm doing the world. So you know what I do to absolve my soul? I actually save-up my paper (all my utility companies still love sending me paper bills no matter how many times I click the 'e-mail me my bill' option on their websites) and when the pile is large enough, put it in my bag and TAKE IT TO WORK where they have a some semblence of a recycling program.
(I haven't even verified if the sort of recycling my work does is actually good, or if all it does is collate our various piles of waste into neat bundles of similar material and then ship it off to some overseas developing nation's slum where they drop it on unsuspecting children. If that's the case, then I might as well just throw the rubbish out and eat a new-born baby to spare the transport company all those wasted travel miles - cut-out the middle man.)
I did come to some sort of conclusion in my white pasta sauce endeavours recently, and I made a variation of that recipe (one that didn't include the wine which is why I still have so much of it to waste on myself) for my family when I stayed with them for dinner last weekend. Hell the meal even included ciabatta bread with pesto on the side. It was the most Italian my family could ever get and I swear I was peeing olive oil the following morning.