Culinary Adventures

Tonight I decided to be somewhat adventurous in my cooking. I found a recipe for Baked Ziti with Fire Roasted Tomatoes. I decided to be even more daring, and I tweaked the recipe here and there and made a few substitutions. The recipe called for ground beef, but I decided to use ground turkey. Everything started out great. I browned the turkey with onions and garlic. So far so good. Once the turkey was no longer pink I added zucchini. Still so far so good. While that cooked for a little longer, I opened up my cans of tomato sauce and fire roasted tomatoes. I poured in the tomato sauce, then dumped in the fire roasted tomatoes. I was stirring everything together, and I realized, "wow, this is kind of on the watery side." I took a second look at the recipe which was prominently posted on my refrigerator with a magnet. What do you know? It said I was supposed to drain the fire roasted tomatoes. Oh, bother! (Ten points to the person who can name the famous chef who says "oh, bother") Oh well, I thought, we'll see what happens. So now came the time when I was supposed to add my pasta to the boiling water. On a last minute whim, I decided to use rigatoni instead of ziti. Why? Who knows. Once the pasta finished cooking, I had to add it to the skillet with the turkey, zucchini, tomato mixture that I had going. I was somewhat surprised with how big rigatoni are after you cook them. They are huge! So somehow I had to add a pound of rigatoni to my sauce and somehow mix them together. It wasn't easy, and a stove top covered with rigatoni, pieces of zucchini, and tomato sauce is proof of how difficult it is. I then had to find a way to dump this 50-pound mixture of pasta and other stuff into a 2-quart casserole dish. A counter top covered with rigatoni, pieces of zucchini, and tomato sauce is proof of how difficult this is. So now I had to bake it. I took a look at the recipe, and it said "cover with foil and bake for 30 minutes." Great. I grabbed my foil and pulled out a 2-inch wide strip of foil. Oi moi! (ancient Greek for "woe is me") So I thought, oh well, and I threw it in the oven anyway. At about 25 minutes, I topped the dish with some mozzarella cheese and put it back in the oven to melt the cheese. Then after a few minutes, I pulled it out.

The top was covered with melted cheesy goodness, but a few pieces of rigatoni were on the toasty and crispy/hard side. Maybe it was because I couldn't cover the dish and that wasn't able to trap the heat and moisture. And, I think that the next time I make this I will definitely use a smaller type of pasta. But, other than that, everything tasted great!
+++++
Update 10:00 p.m.: after rereading this, I suppose I should have written "woe is I." Or maybe I should have written "oh me." Moi is in the dative case. How many of you know what that means?! Maybe we can call it a reflexive dative, but I prefer to call it the Dative of Disadvantage. No, I didn't make that up. It is an actual grammatical term in ancient Greek.