Tabemashou!

The dish is pasta with white sauce and bangus fillet on the side.

Ingredients:

• 500 g of linguine
• 300 g of spaghetti
• 1 can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup
• 1 cup of milk
• garlic
• butter/margarine
• 500g bangus fillet
• grated cheese
• salt and pepper
• 100 g dried mushrooms

Bangus fillet
The bangus fillet needs to be marinated. Use salt, pepper, garlic to marinade the fish. Set it aside for later.

When you’re done with the marinade, you could now cook the bangus fillet. We used the oven toaster.

Put some margarine/butter in the heating tray. Put the bangus fillet on the tray, as well as the bits and pieces of garlic from the marinade. Set the timer to five minutes. Then turn the fish around and heat it up again for another five minutes.

Pasta
Cook the pasta according to the instructions in the packet. In this case, we had to make two batches of pasta because there were more people eating the pasta than we anticipated. JM’s method is a bit different though. We only had a rice cooker, a microwave oven and an oven toaster so he used the rice cooker. He put hot water in the rice cooker then added the noodles even if the water hasn’t boiled yet. He was constantly watching over the pasta.

White Sauce
Put the dried mushrooms in water then chop them up when they are soft already.

Heat the pan (in our case, the rice cooker) and melt the butter/margarine in it. Saute the garlic and the mushrooms. Add the cream of mushroom soup. Simmer. Add a cup of water. Add milk. Simmer. Add grated cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serving the dish
Mix the pasta and sauce. Put it on a nice dish. Put the fish fillet on the side.

Clair’s notes

We weren’t able to anticipate the number of people eating the dish and how big their appetites were individually. We were roughly 6-8 people who shared the food that night. Also, we weren’t able to add enough cheese, salt and pepper to make the sauce more flavorful. Next time, I will buy more dried mushrooms because the texture is great and the flavor so divine! Martin asked me if they were Chinese mushrooms but I wouldn’t really know. Next time I will read the label more carefully. The dish doesn’t look too nice but it’s something we could work on later.

Also, it was one of those times that JM and I really cooked together. It was a bit awkward because I found the pantry too small and his way of cooking very different from mine. But it turned out fine, I think. The sauce was just a bit bland. Jo helped us out with this dish because she loves cooking pasta with white sauce and I didn’t really know much about it.