I found out two friends of Mike’s were coming over at the last minute. We haven’t bought groceries in weeks and I’m truly reaching the bottom of the barrel in terms of pantry/reserves. So I made a skillet full of Random WTF Pasta with the last of the butter, powdered milk, the last of this bag of flour, the last of the Parmesan, every close-to-ripe sweet pepper and cherry tomato in the garden (and it wasn’t very many), the only broth I had left in the freezer (ham, Feb 2017, eek), and the only meat we have, which is some godawful “healthy” turkey sausage stuff his mother gave us.
They liked it so much they offered to the dishes so I’d have time to write down the recipe. I stifled my laughter and said it was just a bechamel, what we had lying around, and some Tony Chachere’s. The wife looked totally mystified.
Oh. In that case, yeah, I’d be happy to share the recipe with you. It will take a while to write down all the esoteric elements and many steps of this recipe that’s been closely guarded and passed down on deathbeds in my family for generations. And I’ll have to give you coordinates so you can find the tiny little Asian grocery store over on the bayou, ’cause it’s the only place in three states you can get some of these ingredients, you can’t even find the road on Google Maps, and she doesn’t have a phone. Oh, and you’ll need the secret handshake.
But since you’re doing the dishes, I should have time. (guffaws)
Well, this might be the only recipe I ever contribute to this blog or any other site in existence, but here you go. I guess you could call it a pasta sausage skillet or something, but I call it Random WTF Pasta.
Pasta cooked al dente, drained.
Sausage – Brown in skillet. If using turkey sausage or similar low-fat/healthy options, ignore any package directions about heating in 3/4″ water or whatever. Cook it in bacon grease for everything to cook properly. (Olive oil or something is better than nothing but you’ll lose a lot of flavor this way.) Remove to paper towels to drain when browned.
Fresh tomatoes and sweet peppers – chop into sizes that will fit on a fork with your pasta. Once you remove your sausage from the skillet, add the peppers and let them cook for a couple of minutes – not so long they get all limp. Add the tomatoes and cook for another minute or two. Then turn off the heat.
Bechamel: milk, butter, flour, parmesan, creole seasoning, pepper, chicken (or whatever) broth. This is just a basic bechamel starting with equal parts butter and flour in a saucepan. If you’ve never made a bechamel, you should probably heat your milk up in a separate saucepan as you’re doing your butter and flour – less likely to get lumps that way, and lumps are usually the problem when bechamel goes wrong. Just heat it on low ’til it just barely bubbles on the sides and then turn off the heat.
For about 3/4 of a large package of pasta, use about 4 TBSP butter and 4 TBSP flour and 2 1/2 cups of milk. Melt the butter and then sprinkle in the flour. Stir constantly for about two minutes. You want a fairly smooth paste that’s starting to bubble but don’t let it brown (turn the heat down if you have to). Even if you get the paste at one minute, you still want to cook it for about 3 minutes or the flour will be raw, and that’s the other way that bechamel usually goes wrong.
Add the hot milk and keep stirring until it comes to a boil. Then add creole seasoning (I use Tony Chachere’s) or whatever other spices, lower the heat, and cook for another 2 minutes or so, stirring the whole time. Add parmesan (about half a cup I guess?) and a splash of broth (amount depends on what consistency you’ve got – you don’t want watery but you don’t want it so thick you can’t pour it, either). Cook for another minute or so, then remove from heat. You might want to taste it once it cools a little and adjust seasonings to your preference.
Once the sauce is the way you like it, add the sausage back to the veggies in the skillet, pour the bechamel over all that, put your pasta in there, stir it all up, and serve it. If anything’s gone cold in the meantime and you need to reheat, you might need another splash or two of broth – you want the sauce to coat everything pretty easily. Then that’s it – serve it up hot.
Karma Soup 