Pasta Pie and Rain :(

Well I have to admit the weather here has been dreadful. I don't know if it is the weather or stress from tests (HELL WEEK!!! - 4 test in 5 days) or the fact that my intestines have currently double knotted themselves, but I am blue. Not the pretty aqua shade that looks great with a tan, but grey blue with no silver lining. In my blue-ness I was have doldrums over what to feed myself. I try to cook meals that can last for several days and I do a lot of doubling the recipe and freezing some so that I don't have to cook and have stuff for my lunch box to take to school. I had left over pasta (egg noodles? maybe) that had been in the fridge awhile. They were still ok to eat but I was tired of looking at them. And I some spaghetti sauce with meat in it. The meat had originally been left over hamburger patties that got crumbled up and put in the red sauce. Meat is on the expensive side here so I never just throw meat out with out a very good reason. I had eaten noodles and sauce about every other meal. And I just could not make myself eat another bowl of noodles and sauce. Not wanting to go to the store and spend money when I had perfectly good food here, I was looking for a way to reinvent what I had. I found a pie crust and some riccotta (LOVE!) and so pasta pie was in the making. I took pictures because I knew that either it was going to be a disaster or really good!

I baked up the pie crust (I did have a little garlic on hand so I did rub this into the crust to help get rid of that "I bought you at the store and left you in the freezer for the last month" taste.

Want to know the reason why the pie crust is some what burned?

THIS is the knob for the oven I LOVE having a full size oven again but seriously. Val and I think that the number are (hopefully) correlated to every 100 degrees. So 1 would be 100 and 2 would be 200 and so on but I have never heard of an oven that would get up to 700 degrees? And I grew up with an industrial style oven as a child! But I digress....

I mixed the noodles with the ricotta, two eggs, and some yoghurt. I did just enough of the mix to coat all the noodles with out it being runny. A quiche this is not.


After that I just started by layering the meat sauce very thinly on the bottom of the pie crust.

Followed by the noodles, cheese (white cheddar was all I had but I am sure a moz or italian blend would be lovely) and more meat sauce - word to the wise cover your noodles completely with meat sauce so they don't lose moisture in the oven when you bake them. Crunchy noodles would not do well in pasta pie. I put a little more cheese on top and stuck it back in the schizo oven.

And here is what happend

The pasta sauce was really well flavored but I couldn't remember what I put in it exactly. (I never use a recipe for things like pasta sauce or off the wall creations. Which is probably why I can never recreate them as good as they were some other time or they are 100% better than they were before.) So I didn't really season every thing else with anything more than appropriate salt and pepper because I hate having components of a dishing having competing flavors. Flavors should go together not against each other. Let the whole thing cool a bit before you slice it so the cheeses and stuff have time to set.

Now back to this: renal physiology. :(

Question of the day: Would excess aldosterone increase the concentration of K in the plasma?