Foodsavered pasta

I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but J and I actually ventured out for Black Friday last year and we picked up a handy Foodsaver at Costco. I'm a big fan of buying too much, so the Foodsaver is a great investment for us, sealing our little vacuum packed meats and storing them safely from freezer burn in the freezer.

The little booklet that comes with the Foodsaver talks a lot about the best way to vacuum seal things and how much longer they last if you vacuum seal things. I like to read manuals when I get new things. Frozen meats last for months longer, fruits for weeks longer. It seems like everything lasts longer. With the nice caveat that you use a bunch of extra bags this way since every time you vacuum pack something, you need a nice extra three inches of bag to seal.

Anyway, I read that booklet back in November and I was looking at my fridge saying, damn, that fresh pasta that we bought is going to dry out and go bad before we use it. So I took my little pasta bundles and put two to a package (that's one serving each for me n J) and vacuum-sealed their little butts together. It looked pretty and well-thought out sitting there in the fridge...

And then we decided to have pasta. I dropped it into the pot of boiling water and ... THUNK. Hm. Gave it a little bit of time to separate and it still didn't work. And so, I have learned that the vacuum seal pretty much molds the pasta together into a nice firm ball. I had to scoop it out and throw it away. J said the same thing happened when I made fresh pasta and let it dry in pretty little nests. If you are wondering how you should drop fresh pasta, you let it hang over wooden dowels (you can pay like $30 for a little wooden-dowel pasta drying ... thing) or you can spread it out on a cookie sheet (less air movement) and when it's all dry, THEN you wrap it in a pretty nest.

In other news, we went to Madras Chettinaad for dinner and it was awesome. I was craving their fish curry so we got some of that as well as their saag paneer which was good and spicy too. J got the lamb vindaloo which was pretty much too spicy to even be in my presence. He loved it though, and I loved my fish curry, so both parties were happy. And we had leftovers to eat the next day.

Well, I just talked to my boss (I had called her about an email I got about a last-minute change to the production server from her boss two levels up) and she told me to go to bed. Ever the good little employee, off I go!