Quick and Easy Linguine Alfredo

Before we begin, I have three disclaimers:

1) I am no expert of alfredo sauces. They come out yummy, but the texture is never quite creamy.

2) I do not claim that this is a healthy meal by any means. :P

3) This is a meal born entirely of leftovers.

To Elaborate:

Last Thursday was Acturon's birthday, so I made his favorite, lasagna (sorry, I didn't take photos ;[ ). The grocery store only had 15oz Ricotta (double what I needed). So I ventured to make stuffed shells with alfredo sauce using the leftover Ricotta (again, sorry no pix - by the time I remembered, I was already 1/3 of the way through cooking it). Used up the Ricotta, but now remained leftover half 'n' half. Finally, we also had half a box of linguine leftover from some time previous. So voila! We have Linguine Alfredo for dinner. lol

Now to begin:

Normal people probably use a saucepan to make their alfredo sauce. Even I used to be one of those normal people at one point, but I've found that using the frying pan helps me to better visibly eyeball how much Parmesan cheese goes into the sauce. . once upon a time I also used a recipe like the one below, which you may choose to do instead of trying to figure out what I did here.

1 stick butter, 1pt heavy cream, 2-3 cloves garlic, 1.5c -2c Parmesan, 1/4c fresh parsley (shyah right)

Once upon a time I actually kind of followed that recipe. Today the recipe was altered thusly:

1/2 stick butter, 1/2 pt Half n Half, ~1tbsp crushed garlic, ??? cheese, ?? dried parsley and ?? salt, black pepper and garlic powder. *snort*

I played around with various temperatures and finally settled on this medium-low-ish temperature. It's set to 3.5 in case the flash makes it impossible to see.

You begin with melting some butter. :) Feel free to use less, I even contemplated using less for this, but when I gave the Half 'n' Half a lil' shake, I found it was about half full so I stuck with this amount of butter.

I attempted to show the garlic in three stages. The first to demonstrate how much I used, the second to show that you swish it around the pan (lol very technical terms used here) and the final is supposed to show like what stage of browning I took it to. The cooking show people would say to cook it until your butter is infused with garlic. That is I think a fancy way of saying "when the pan smells strongly of garlic." lol Anyway, this is when I added the cream. :)

So, you add the Half and Half and swish it around (there's that expert term again :D) so that everything is sort of blended together... which isn't ultimately all that blended considering the butter is sort of floating on top still, but you get the picture... or got the picture? Pun? Maybe? Perhaps I should have also added a disclaimer of (warning, I think my weirdo sense of humor is funny when deep down I know people only laugh _at_ me and not _with me_.. :P) :)

After adding the cream (Half and Half in this case) I very lightly sprinkled some salt to enhance the flavor. Then, more liberally added some garlic powder in about the same pattern as what you see of the black pepper, which is of course way more visible than the salt and garlic powder. And then finally the black pepper was added where you can clearly see approximately how much I used. Is that an oxymoron? Clearly see .. approximate... >.> Hrm.. Maybe I should go to bed instead of staying up late posting blogs that are scheduled to be posted the next day at some arbitrary time...

These two pictures are supposed to represent how much cheese I added, but I highly doubt you can see what I did. And quite honestly, even if you could say, I would tell you to put less than what I did because the sauce ended up a bit more grainy than I would have preferred. Again, tasted delicious, but argh with the texture!! Anyway as a description of what I did, I generally try to sprinkle the cheese across the whole pan in a pattern akin to spreading mozzarella over a pizza pie. :)

Mix the cheese together and then add approximately that amount of parsley. :) Do I feel that parsley enhances the flavor of my alfredo? Hell no! I don't even know why it was in whatever original recipe I found/posted above. But it adds a nice color and makes the sauce pretty. And I don't know, maybe it does do something for the flavor, but I am generally of the opinion that parsley seems absolutely pointless to my taste-buds and is there solely to appeal to my visual senses.

This is what the sauce looks like after letting it cook for approximately ten minutes. Yeah I forgot to mention this entire meal was prepared in about the time it takes to boil some water and cook your pasta to al dente (~10mins in my case - cook times differ per pasta type). Doesn't it look pretty and tasty? :) No? Well go away then. (>.<) BTW- I will mention that this dinner is a remarkably fast process if it's so quick with _me_ doing it. Normally dinners take me at least an hour to prepare... >.> This one was maybe 20 minutes? So like normal people with pots and stoves that boil water faster and don't stop to take pictures between each step may even get this done in 15 minutes or less. Now how fast is THAT for making dinner?? Eat that 30 minute meal Rachel Ray. lmao

This is my half a box of linguine. I'm making the gross assumption here that I don't need to explain how to boil water and follow the instructions on your box of pasta. This isn't cooking level negative one - o - one. :P~~

To finish, mix your pasta into your sauce. Since I made linguine, I used a spaghetti spoon to mix it as this allowed me to pick up the pasta and move it around easier.

Alternatives:

Your favorite pasta such as the traditional fettuccine, or penne, medium shells, bowtie.. whatever you fancy.

Serve with garlic bread (sometime I'll show how I make my garlic bread ^_^)

Add delicious garlic-y chicken. When I'm lazy I add pre-cooked, diced frozen chicken (I think Tyson's makes the bag?) - just reheat in a separate frying pan and add to the sauce at the end. :) Or, you can chop up your own chicken and cook it with garlic --- or or or, you can do what the traditional restaurant type peoples do and GRILL your chicken! :)

Add broccoli, peas or whatever veggie you like.

Serve with Caesar salad..

I think you've grasped the idea by now. :) I will add as a note that with my recipe especially, and I believe even if you have "doggy bagged leftovers" from a restaurant, alfredo sauce never seems to reheat well. I usually end up with a mass of butter and some crumby cheese over pasta... ~_~ So on that note, I have the following tips:

1) If you know you are making more alfredo than what you intend to eat in one night:

DO NOT add your pasta to the sauce. Or at least do so in smaller quantities and in a separate container. Later, when you reheat your sauce (over the stove - NOT the microwave), add a little splash of milk and perhaps a sprinkling of other key ingredients such as garlic powder or Parmesan cheese. -- Just enough to rekindle the taste and texture of your sauce.

2) As you may have observed you can use either heavy cream or half 'n' half for your alfredo. However, I do not recommend using fat free half 'n' half. I tried it once before and all I got was a mass of stringy cheese. Feel free to try it and comment - maybe I had forgotten my recipe when I made it and forgot some key ingredient. But if you're not up for wasting your materials and efforts in the experiment of how I failed (lol) then I recommend avoiding it. :)

Hope your alfredo turns out as delicious as this one did! Ours is already all gone. :(