fideo- hopping on forbidden ground

Fideo
Originally uploaded by la_fleur.

flavi and i agree on most food related questions; garlic makes everything better (even ice cream), you cant use too much olive oil, paprika, even if i can't say it "right" is great, chopsticks are super, and spaghetti is pretty much the worst sort of pasta imaginable. for my monday-night-need-to-feel-healthier dinner i decided to try a recipe i found on my allrecipes.com dashboard (http://chicken.allrecipes.com/az/FidMxicnSpghtti.asp). the challenge with this concoction is its call for spaghetti. now, little flavi and i surely love our pasta, but we arrived at the conclusion quite early in our friendship that spaghetti was wholly unacceptable. at first i dismissed such a recipe on the grounds of its noodly content, but the description sounded rather exciting- no boiling of pasta, rather toasted pasta that remained largely straight. the preview picture looked a bit like a starched up flying-spaghetti monster, flaling his noodly appendages about in a straight armed fashion. this comedic appearance alone appealed to me, plus i could use angel hair pasta, which bothers me slightly less than its thicker sibling. of course, after my cooking, i am still left with 3/4 a package of angel hair pasta, which i will need to find a good use for. perhaps some elementray school style art: construction paper and elmer's glue accompany useless spaghetti quite well.

the dish is simple: sautee chicken, set aside and dice, brown pasta in olive oil, add onions, tomatoes, cumin, red pepper flakes, salt, pepper and a small amount of water, return chicken to skillet and cover for 10 minutes, top with cheddar cheese and serve. quite a quaint little dish.

though, again i've made a meal filled with chicken... as has been the case pretty much everything i have made of late. i need the influence of dear flavi for some creativity in my food. pursuing svensk dishes is my best bet, though their reliance on herring has caused me to steer clear for the most part. a little b0rk in every persons life is good, though.

two items were notably absent in this dinner: bread and wine. truly, this was a dinner that sumbled astray of traditions for foody fun with flavi, but it turned out alright nonetheless. i was making too much food in the beginning and my recovering insides simply were not yet up to bread and wine standards, so i pushed off my two dinner staples until another time- despite having a lovely selection of wines from whole foods on the table and a nice baguette waiting for consumption. today is tuesday, though, so there is little doubt that i will return to tradition this evening.

when i finished the fideo, as it is called, i quickly served it up to my short-ish friend who was breaking her yom kippur fast and to my oft-hungry roommate who just slipped in under the dinner bell buzzer for some of my large-ish dish. they both seemed pleased, as was i. though, i was told some green needed to be added to the dish for appropriate color balance- it all tended a bit toward one end of the light spectrum. some parsely would set it off nicely- or a different sort of green-ish pasta might do the trick! if you follow the recipe i've linked to, undercook the chicken a bit, as it cooks more when you return it to the skillet with the pasta, unfortunately our kyckling became a bit rubbery after theexcess cooking- flavor was still spot on, but not as tender as i hoped. i used free range chicken to keep the greenies happy, so my karma points helped the dish taste better.

cooking without flavi is never as much fun, but i can experiment with some forbidden-type foods and see how they come out. i cannot wait until we wander our way together again for something else exciting, but until then, she will have to influence me from afar!