A good food day

I don't know what got into me today, but I was inspired to kind of experiment and make some new dishes. Or I should say one new dish (that I've decided will be the non-pizza Signature Dish of my restaurant), and a kind of new dessert that needs a little tinkering still. But both turned out well, and will be made again in the future.

First, for lunch, I wanted to make something with the noodles I had left. So I started them boiling, with some salt, garlic, and olive oil in the water. While those were in the pot, I diced and sauteed up the rest of the onion that I had left over from the weekend in some butter, along with some garlic (I love garlic, I feel that one can never have too much). Once I had decided that they were done enough, I melted some more butter in, and then poured in a little milk to start a sort of bechamel sauce, and let it briefly simmer. Next, I julienned some ham, and added that to the sauce. (note: this could be omitted for a vegetarian dish, or if you don't like ham for some strange reason. Also, it would've been better with prosciutto or a smokey bacon, but the Virginia smoked ham I had worked well.) I added a little flour to thicken the sauce a little, and then added the noodles and tossed it all together with some olive oil. After I plated it, I put sprinkled on some crushed red peppers and fresh basil, and then topped with a little fresh pico de gallo. It was hell of delicious.

After a while, I got a yearning for some peanut butter cookies. Usually I just go to the Java House and have one of theirs, but I decided to stay in today and not spend any money (I've spent much too much of it recently). It took a while, but I found a recipe that didn't call for the dough to be chilled for 3+ hours, but I didn't quite have all of the ingredients, so I improvised. For some reason I only had crunchy peanut butter (which I don't really like, I don't know why I'd have a jar of it, unless it had been inherited from past roommates), and no baking soda or oats. And I didn't want to use the amount of butter that was called for, so I used some applesauce for part of it. I didn't really measure what I was using, just sort of eye-balled it, but the dough was basically butter, applesauce, white and brown sugar, an egg, flour, baking powder, and some cocoa powder. The cookies turned out pretty well, not the best cookies I've made, but definitely not the worst. I think if I had had the oats, they would've been much better. And a little bit more cocoa powder would've been nice. But I think for my first try, these were fine. Besides, where's the fun in getting everything perfect on the first try?