Birthday card recipe no. 4: Florence + Britt’s Amazing Tomato PASTAAA!!!

I was appointed a chef in our first night at Bombong Tiga,
With Florence and Britt, we impressed with our pasta,
We added some sauce, some veggies and this thing called ‘corned beef’,
(Some tinned reddish stuff that was supposedly meat),
We cooked and we served; the portions were small,
But hey don’t complain! It’s Raleigh rations for all!
I think and I hope the meal went down well enough,
Because trumping ‘Amazing Tomato PASTAAA!!!’ is going to be tough.

And somehow, when I cooked it today, it just wasn’t the same. Maybe it was the corned beef I was using today, maybe it had real meat in it and I just wasn’t accustomed to the taste?

Yes, I do realise that I am holding the can the wrong way round, that’s where the ring was to pull open the can! And despite the ring, I still managed to cut myself. Corned beef is DANGEROUS. 

Or maybe it was because I used fresh pasta rather than the dried packet-of-durum-wheat-semolina-that-had-been-nibbled-into-by-cockroaches? (This didn’t actually happen the first night, but it did that night we had the pasta with mushroom sauce. Yeah…sorry that you guys had to find out this way)

Or maybe it was the chickpeas, these ones sold in Britain just aren’t as mushy as the Malaysian kind – a disappointment not only to my taste buds but also to my teeth – becuase I now had to put in that extra bit of effort when chewing my food.

I was disappointed to discover that the name ‘chickpeas’ comes from the Latin name ‘cicer’ and reached the English language after passing through French, and not that it came from the word ‘chickens’. Can you imagine prehistoric chickens ‘peeing’ and the end result coming out to be something that looked all-too-like a yellowish buttery round vegetable, and so then this vegetable (when the English language had actually reached our prehistoric ancestors) was named after that chicken excrement incident? How cool would THAT be?

OR maybe it was the lack of Britt’s pasta boiling skills (I have to say boiling 3 packs of pasta in a dented bit metal pot to perfect al dente is pretty impressive).

Us cooking the very dish on that very night. We put the wok on top of the pot to cook the sauce because it acted like a lid (which we didn’t have and proved a problem when trying to boil the pasta water) and we could pretend it was a cauldron with magic swirling broth underneath it (just me? Okay.)

Either way, the pasta seemed to be more brilliant in Borneo. But that’s not to say what I cooked today wasn’t nice; I finished everything, and I liked it. It was yummy. I even saved some from the pan for my parents to look forward to at dinner (they didn’t like it. But then again they don’t like chocolate which means there is obviously something genetically wrong with them – thank God I didn’t inherit it).

However, this recipe shows that tomato pasta is a no fail no frills no fuss dish; and if you can make it in the jungle with food that you feel has to be described in ‘inverted commas’ due to it’s lack of actual edible substance; you can make it anywhere!

Lesson learned today: Chickpeas are not related to chickens, in any shape, way or form. Boringly so.

I think the recipe is pretty self explanatory ;)