Night 1 01/31/10 Spaghetti and Meatballs

Tonight was not originally going to be the first night of the Supper Club, but I had a bag of frozen meatballs I threw in the slow cooker in the early afternoon, so that turned into a roommate dinner. As an Italian-American, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I did not make the meatballs or the sauce from scratch, so maybe if I get the recipe from my mom or grandma, I'll make an attempt. Anyway, I spent today doing research at home, so I decided to try something in the slow cooker.

The meal was very simple tonight:

1 bag frozen meatballs
1 jar of spicy basil tomato sauce
angelhair pasta (for 3 people, I used about a 1/3 of a box)*

I put the frozen meatballs in the slow cooker with a whole jar of sauce. It took 3 hours for them to cook. I then made the angelhair and dumped it right in the slow cooker, mixed it together, and voila, easiest Sunday pasta meal ever.

Real simple. Real good. The kicker was the spicy basil tomato sauce. And if I hadn't killed my basil plant last week, I would have chopped some fresh basil and added it on top.

*Here is my tip for measuring how much pasta to cook, cause I find it to be a difficult thing to measure. When you bunch the uncooked pasta together in your hand, 1 serving should be about the size of a quarter.

Tonight's dinner was embarassingly easy. I promise something fancier this week.

Form, Function, and Food: The Mission

So here is the deal...I am an architecture student. For anyone reading this that is an architect or also in architecture school, you know all the implications of that little phrase. For everyone else, it means that my life is unapologetically dedicated to all things related to architecture and design. I am currently a 6th year graduate student at the Clemson University in South Carolina, in my last semester of school. With unapologetic dedication to architecture comes very little time for anything outside of school. So after almost 6 consecutive years of architectural education, I am taking advantage of a little bit of freetime in my last 4 months as a student.

I have recently discovered a new love of cooking, and I think I am somewhat talented at it. I also have hungry roommates, who often times don't like to cook as much as I do. After many meals cooked by me and enjoyed by the roommates, we've come to an agreement. They will pay me a small fee a week in exchange for me cooking dinner several nights a week. The fee isnt decided, nor is the amount of required meals a week, so more info on the exact terms of the arrangement will follow. Tonight marks night 1 of what I am calling the "Hart's Cove Supper Club," and this is the pilot week of the experiment. Armed with recipes from cookbooks, the internet, and my mom (and also a whole mess of dinners invented on the fly), I'll be cooking for 3 or 4 people, several nights a week, on a college students budget (which is almost nothing.) Posts will include info and recipes on each night's meal (failures and successes) and most likely updates on my life in Clemson, SC, as an architecture student who would probably rather be cooking.

Cheers!