LOT (Lemon Onions Taters) pasta

Posted by Wayne (Melbourne, Australia) on 9 March 2007 in Food & Cuisine and Portfolio.

I had the privilege to cook for 40 leaders at a recent church leaders retreat. The retreat was earth-shattering and awesome but that's a story for another day. Being the head honcho in the kitchen does have its perks...like having the liberty to create the menu and in particular to just have fun with leftovers. Part of the joy, for me, of being in the kitchen is the ability to take leftovers or surplus ingredients/food and to turn them into something completely new and different.

Sharene, my beloved superior, felt hungry in the period between lunch (SpagBol) and dinner (Roast Chicken with Lemon and Rosemary Taters)...and I hate to see people go hungry...so I had a bunch of leftover cooked pasta, diced parboiled taters, a spare lemon that had been boiled, a spare onion and some free time (the chickens all 10 of them were already in the oven roasting merrily away)....So what I did (and unfortunately given that it was an improvised thing there's no quantified recipe for this) was to chuck the onion (having been diced) with some olive oil on the pan...once they were sizzling nicely, I tossed in the potatoes (having further reduced their size by chopping them up a bit more) and added more oil in. The addition of more olive oil was for two purposes...the first was to make sure that the chuffed bits of the taters would be nice and crispy (for a reason that will be made apparent later) and the second to form the substantive body of the pasta sauce.

Once the whole pan was nice and sizzling..I tossed in the pasta (for two...for Sharene and of course for myself =D) and then squeezed the lemon juice all over whilst constantly tossing it around...I did this for about 30s to a minute so that the pasta would be nice,warm and softened and so that they would be evenly coated in the olive oil/lemon sauce. The final touch before removing it was to toss some salt in to taste...and I cracked some black pepper over it.

I removed the pasta/sauce mixture from heat and placed them onto two plates. Then I returned the pan to the heat to continue to deep fry the chuffed up tater bits (which had broken off from the larger tater pieces) until they were a nice golden brown (I added cracked pepper in the process to flavour the pieces). The crispy bits where then placed onto of the pasta in a bit to improve the presentation of it as well as the taste.

I am thankful that I got the Sharene seal of approval....and it wasn't too bad if I do say so myself =D

On retrospect, its a really easy and forgiving recipe and one which allows for alot of variation. Feel free to experiment and let me know how it goes. =D

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