Easy Three Ingredient Pasta Recipe

Hola darlings!

As I'm sure you are, I'm busy with revving up for the holidays and tonight is no exception. Right now we are heading into our busiest six months of the year (November through April 15 next)  at the office, so it's double time.  I am still not adjusted to daylight savings time and until December 21 when I KNOW thereafter days will start to get longer a few minutes each day, it's a struggle to get up in the dark (6 a.m.), come home in the dark (after 5 p.m.), and not want to crawl under the covers of my comfy bed and shoot zzzzz's at the ceiling at 7 p.m. until the alarm goes off the next morning - in the dark!

I want to let you know about this dish I whipped up last night.  It's not an original idea - pasta, egg and - add your favorite ingredients.  I recall seeing a Bittmann versus the World on PBS a few years ago and it was pasta (spaghetti), onion, some herbs, I think mushrooms, and a couple of eggs.  It was easy, quick and although I couldn't taste it, it certainly looked delicious!

I love to cook, but since I do not have the best skills (think "Hell's Kitchen" reject) I keep things pared down and easy as possible.  I don't know what put the idea in my mind, but I thought, what the hell.  I happened to have fresh mushrooms because I had a craving for sauteeing some in butter (yum!) and had picked up an 8 oz. package a day before.  I was going to cook them up for myself one way or another.  I always have dried, store-bought pasta in the house, and I usually have eggs.  So I thinly sliced about 4 ounces of the button mushrooms and while I started sauteeing them in butter (about a tablespoon) in a large non-stick pan, I put on a single size serving of store bought dried thin spaghetti to boil - probably 4 ounces.  I lightly seasoned the mushrooms (salt and pepper only) and sauteed them to the level of doneness I like. 

When the pasta was just el dente, I drained it and, turning the heat off in the sautee pan, tossed the pasta into the pan, mixing it with the mushrooms and butter.  I had, while the pasta was finishing it's final minute at the boil, fork-whipped an egg in a bowl and after the pasta was incorporated into the mushrooms and butter, poured it over the mixture in the hot pan, stirring with my trusty wooden spoon all the while.  After a few stirs in the pan the pasta was coated and the egg was cooked but not scrambled.  Must be served immediately - and I sure was ready.  It looked very good and was - delicious! 

After the fact, I thought a fab topping would be some fresh-grated whatever your favorite cheese is.  And next time, some sauteed onions added in.

The trick is the timing and residual heat in the pan for adding and cooking the egg.  The pan can't be too hot because the egg will scramble, which would no doubt taste very good anyway but not look so good (although it could probably be disguised with some grated cheese at the very end :))  The look you're after is a semi-glossy, no lumps egg-coated pasta.

Hmmm, maybe my technique is better than I thought...

LOL!

Squirrels Get High - and Survive

Squirrels and toxic mushrooms By Ned Rozell September 06, 2007 Fairbanks reader Darleen Masiak recently saw a red squirrel carrying an Amanita mushroom across her deck, presumably to stash it in its midden for the winter. She wanted to know how such a small mammal could survive after eating a mushroom that is toxic in large doses. Fungus expert Gary Laursen of the University of Alaska Fairbanks confirmed that forest squirrels, both red and flying, cache Amanita mushrooms as well as other 'psychoactive' mushrooms that affect the central nervous system. He has dug into squirrel middens in the boreal forest and has found many samples of the mushrooms. He said a biologist recently contacted him and told he'd seen grouse digging up and eating mushrooms that would be toxic in large doses to humans. "Many animals are known to go after the psychoactive mushrooms," Laursen said. Brian Barnes, a physiologist and the director of the Institute of Arctic Biology, said a squirrel's liver might be able to detoxify the active agents in the mushrooms, but he knows of no evidence for this. Barnes studies arctic ground squirrels on Alaska's North Slope. He thinks young male ground squirrels might be eating lots of fungi, including potent ones, as they stir in their dens from hibernation. The squirrels often emerge from hibernation fatter than when they went in. "I wonder if, while in their cold and completely dark hibernaculum, arctic ground squirrels are eating psychoactive mushrooms and whether they respond by experiencing hallucinations, feelings of well being, and laughing fits, as do humans (or so I'm told)," Barnes wrote in an email.