Pasta, Pasta, and Pasta

                Pasta is the most known food or dishes in the world that represent Italian food, but, everyone only knows a little bit about pasta. Most of people worldwide only knew spaghetti, fettuccini, lasagna, macaroni, penne, or fusilli. The first reference of pasta dishes was found in Sicily, 1154, although truthfully pasta was already eaten by man in 1^st BC and it was called lagana. Lagana was a bit different compare to pasta, lagana was a fine sheet of dough that was deep fried not boil, and pasta was cooked by boiling it. Pasta was made from unleavened dough of wheat flour that was mix with water and oil. When making fresh egg pasta, use soft flour or all-purpose flour, rather than semolina flour that were used in factory-made pasta, to make it more tender pasta. Some pasta are better with thick sauce and some pasta are better if eaten as a soup, there are many different type of pasta that many people did not know about

1. Long Pasta

                Long pasta was usually made extrusion, which is the dough was pushed in to holes; long pasta can also be made by rolling and cutting. The dough for long pasta made from semolina flour not soft flour, combine with water and oil. In this category of pasta, there is spaghetti, long thin cylindrical pasta; spaghettoni, extra long and thick spaghetti; pelizzoni, thick spaghetti; spaghettini, thin spaghetti; fadelini, a very thin spaghetti; capelini, thinnest type of long pasta; bucatini, a thick spaghetti like pasta with hole running through the center; fusilli bucati, long coiled tubes that are hollow, and many more of pasta. Long pastas are best eaten with sauce or gravy, line, meat sauce, tomato sauce, clam sauce, and the other thick sauce.

2. Ribbon-cut Pasta

                Ribbon cut pasta can be made by hand or mechanically. Ribbon cut pasta was rolled and then cut, different from long pasta, ribbon cut pasta was usually flat shape and not round. Same with long pasta, ribbon cut pasta made from semolina flour, water, and oil, but some of the ribbon cut pasta was made from egg pasta dough.  In ribbon cut pasta category, there are fettuccine, flat long pasta with 6.5 millimeters wide; fettuce, wider version of fettuccine; tagliatelle, narrower than fettuccine; spaghetti alla chitarra, similar to spaghetti but, rather than round, the spaghetti was flatten; lasagna, very wide pasta that are often have fluted edges; lasagnette, narrower version of lasagna; lasagnotte, wider version of lasagna; linguine, flattened spaghetti; and many more. Similar to long pasta, ribbon cut pasta was usually eaten with very rich meat sauce or cream sauce.

3. Short-cut Pasta

                Short-cut pasta have many different shapes, some of the short-cut pasta are short round shapes with holes through in the middle like, macaroni, cannelloni, cavatappi, cellentani, ditalini, fideua, gomti, and many more, and some of short-cut pasta are corkscrew shapes like, fusilli, rotini, gemeli,marziani, and so on. For short cut pasta, they are usually made by extrusion and machine. The best dishes that use short-cut pasta usually are soup based dishes.

There are many different shapes of pasta that haven’t been talked here like minuet pasta or stuff pasta. When choosing pasta, we need pasta that are not smooth but have a rough surface. Also, when choosing pasta, not always the fresh one is the good one, we can also have the better one from the factory made, we just need to know the qualification like the surface of the pasta and the texture of the pasta. But what we want to talked here is how to have the best dishes with the right pasta to eat with like what pasta to eat with meat sauce or what pasta to eat with soup.

Left Over Food

Why everyone love chicken nugget? What is in chicken nugget that people love so much? Is it because of the taste and texture? I am the person who also loves to eat chicken nugget, and like anybody else, I love to eat chicken nugget because it is deep fried food. Who doesn’t like deep fried food? The crunchiness of the deep fried outer layer, the soft and chewiness on the inside, and topped with ketchup, chili sauce and mayonnaise in your mouth. Who can resist food like that?

But, I have seen how they made chicken nugget. Although it doesn’t practice in all industry, but some of them still do this kind of practices. In the industry, if they have a chicken, the edible parts that they can use are the chicken legs, and the chicken breast. So, where are the rest go? Will it be thrown away? The answer is no. if it is only one or two chicken then that is fine to throw away, but, in the big industry, they didn’t only use one or two chicken, they might use one thousand or ten thousand or even more. If they throw away the remaining part of the chicken it will be a big cost for them. So, they do brain storming on how to sell this remaining part of the chicken to the customers. Then, they come up with a brilliant idea to combine all of the remaining parts, like the bone, head, feet, connective tissue and skin, and blend them together finely. And now, they have a chicken paste, but because there still have some bone parts, connective tissue, they have to put it in the strainer to have the clean part of the chicken paste. Then, to make it taste nice and smells nice, they put in stabilizer to stabilize, flavoring, and mix it all up, and lastly they put bread crumb for the covering and deep fried it. And surprisingly, people from all over the world love it so much.

With ingredients like that, it is not surprising that if you eat a lot of chicken nugget you can get sick. Well, in short term you will feel not energetic, or even anemia. It is cause because, there is no important nutrition such as calcium, fiber, vitamins, antioxidants, and healthy fats in chicken nugget, and it is high in calorie. And the worst thing that can happen is it can increase someone blood pressure and cause heart attack.

Some of us didn’t know this truth about chicken nugget, and some of us did. Which bring me to my first question, why everyone love chicken nugget? Now, If you already know this facts, will you still eat chicken nugget?

Grany's Nasi Uduk

One of the best foods from Indonesia is Nasi Uduk. Nasi uduk is a food made from rice that is prepared similar like nasi lemak. It is cooked by heating coconut milk in a pan with lemon grass, pandan leaf, and bay leaf then, we use the mixture to cook the rice. Nasi uduk is usually eaten with spices fried chicken, omelet egg, caramelized tempe and chips, and last but not least the nasi uduk’s sambal.

For me, the best nasi uduk that I have ever eaten in my life is my grandmother’s nasi uduk. Once in every two weeks on the Friday, my grandmother always cooks nasi uduk for lunch. It was in my fourth grade when I was starting to help my grandmother. First thing in the morning, we will go to a market located near my house. In the market, we will buy chicken, coconut, peanuts, and some herbs and spices. Then we will go home to do the cooking. As a child, I cannot cook anything; I cannot touch the tools because it was hot, so when my grandmother cooks the nasi uduk and spices fried chicken, I will be in charge of making the sambal. The sambal for nasi uduk is a little different from the normal fried chicken sambal, because, it uses crushed peanuts to give the texture. The best part of making the sambal is when my grandmother is done frying the peanuts and I started to crush it. The peanuts were crushed by a peanuts grinder. For me as a child, it was the happiest things to do. It was like playing a game for me. Everyday I always wait for the next friday that my grandmother will cook nasi uduk again.

And that is the first time I tried to make some food, although it was just a sambal. But, I still can remembered how happy I was when I to go to market, looking at raw ingredients there, and the filling when I grinded the peanuts