So today I fried spaghetti...
Two days ago I found this blog: http://www.herbivoracious.com
It's the only food blog I've ever gotten excited about; I almost want to take a year off my job and cook every recipe in this blog, and then blog about it myself. I think blogging about a blog is much like being a suburb of a suburb, but since I grew up in an exurb that actually seems appropriate. Of course I'm not really that motivated in the domestic department, so instead I think I will wait it out until the blogger eventually opens a restaurant, and then use my vacation days + frequent flyer miles to become a regular there.
Since three of my favorite things in the world are noodles, fried stuff, and Asian food, I was especially intrigued by this recipe. We actually have most of the ingredients at hand, but I would have had to go out and buy soba noodles, and that was just too much work. On the other hand, we did have leftover angel hair pasta sitting in the fridge. And as luck always has it, there was not enough sauce left to go with the rest of the pasta.
As far as food preparation goes, I'm high on ideas (ie, I often know exactly what I would like to eat) and low on technique (so I'm generally ill-equipped to feed my cravings). Often this is where B comes in, but this time I fried the spaghetti myself, thus freeing him up for more important things. (Like, basically anything.)
I started by mixing the remaining sauce (a standard tomato-based pasta sauce from a jar) into the pasta. I figured it was probably good that there wasn't much to go around, since the noodles would fry up better if they weren't absolutely dripping with sauce (note that the noodles in the recipe had no sauce). I tried to follow the recipe by using ~1/8 inch of canola oil, but B later pointed out that since the recipe called for 1/8 inch veg oil, I should have either used veg oil or halved the amount. Apparently canola oil is much, much greasier. Once the oil got hot I went ahead and dropped little balls of the slightly sauced pasta into the pan, pressed them flat with the spatula, and then stood there and got splattered with oil for awhile until I realized I should put the lid on the pan. (Like I said, low on technique.) I eventually flipped them over so each side could get crispy, though it took like 10 minutes rather than the 2 minutes the recipe suggested for them to crisp up (probably because of all the excess oil + the use of sauce). The result was smallish noodly pancakes that were dripping with orangish grease (orange because of the tomato sauce). I did my best to dry them on paper towels, but they were still quite grease-laden, and...
(If I were motivated I would include a picture here. But I think we've gone over this, right? Just try to picture little pancakes made of noodles, sitting on a paper towel soaked in orange grease plate.)
...surprisingly quite good! They were more pancake-like than I'd expected, and I could easily roll them up in one hand and eat them like a potato pancake. The edges were nice and crisp, and the middles were more chewy, but I didn't mind the variation. The tomato bits in the sauce had gotten slightly caramelized, and the frying had enhanced the flavor of the sauce enough that the pancakes were plenty flavorful without a lot of sauce. I've actually always thought that there should be a crunchy version of pasta, so I'm quite pleased to find out that there is and it's exceptionally easy to make. The downside would be all the grease involved; next time I do this I'm going to cut way back on oil.
Anyway, this is a fun thing to do with leftover noodles, and if you don't have leftover noodles in your fridge, I don't want to hear about it; you have only yourself to blame. I think next time I'll make noodly cookies or cupcakes, and will of course let you know via whatever the current mode of communication is when I finally get around to that. In the meantime, those of you who like food and aren't convinced that you're taurine-deficient would probably like the aforementioned blog.