I don’t think a good one pot pasta exists. It’s possible, in fact, that there is no truly good dish that can be made in a single pan (except maybe instant noodles). Like, even if I made the best braise ever… I’d still need to make rice to put it on, you know? It’s not a meal without the rice. But one pan pasta is the worst. A sin, because it tricks you. It lies to you and says “you can have this pasta cook in one pot with sauce and it will taste good and be the right amount of cooked” and of course, neither is ever true. Back in the heyday of one pot pasta dishes I definitely made a few. I gave them my best shot. I wanted them to work as much as anyone who wasn’t a food blogger or professional recipe aggregator, since they seemed to be somehow in the pocket of, I don’t know, big one pot pasta? Who was sponsoring that scam? Barilla?
I made the classic (I think? it was a long time ago, this was back when millenials were getting recipe links off of buzzfeed) with tomatoes and stuff, I’ve tried a “creamy” version that probably had cream cheese or something in it, and more recently I made one that sounded pretty good from smitten kitchen lady, whose recipes I usually like fairly well. It was a mess. I’m sorry smitten kitchen lady, it’s not good. Don’t trick me. I understand the idea of braising your broccoli and mixing it with pasta but a one pan pasta will never be as well emulsified as one where you just add the pasta water to a real sauce. The pasta will be overdone or the sauce will be watery. It’s bad! Maybe it’s just me, but I reject that idea.
Anyway, this is sort of like a one pot dish, except you need a second pot to make rice, so it isn’t really. Sometimes I worry that I’m cooking too much rice, and that Noah will develop an aversion to rice after eating it for most meals in a week, but then I think about other foods, and decide to cook rice again. This was one of those nights. This is a little easy dinner for two, or one and lunch. The main point here is to fry the tofu before stir frying everything. The woks of life calls for just tossing in some raw, uncut tofu with your stir fry, and I would like to suggest this as an intervention or whatever. You can definitely keep your tofu plain and uncooked if you want…. but it won’t be as good.
The sunchoke is, admittedly, quite random. This is an all CSA stir fry, and I was trying to figure out what a sunchoke was, (I feel like I sort of remember them from back in the day, but maybe I am thinking of sunbutter? not sure) but I read that when raw they “sort of taste like water chestnuts.” I wasn’t sure if it was true so I decided to try it. I mean listen, if you have a huge bag of sunchokes and don’t know what to do with them… this is an option.
Whatever there isn’t a clean transition here, but I thought this was a really valuable article about the genocide in Gaza.
Stir fried tofu, broccoli and carrots with sunchokes
Serves 2
Rice, cooked
Half a block of tofu
Small head of broccoli
Single biggish carrot
Single sunchoke (or more if you don’t have IBS)
Little bit of ginger
Scant tbs oyster sauce
Scoop of chili crisp
1/3 cup stir fry sauce (didn’t measure)
1 tsp or so corn starch
If you’re using a rice cooker, put rice on to cook. Slice tofu into flat squares and set on a towel to dry for a minute (help you get less splatter when you add it.)
Heat wok until smoking, then lower the heat a bit and add a few tablespoons of oil. Fry tofu for a few minutes, until browned. Set aside. Slice each square down diagonal, like a grilled cheese sandwich.
Prepare vegetables: using your knife break the broccoli into small florets. Slice carrot into thin slices. Julienne ginger. Slice sunchoke.
Mix oyster sauce and chili crisp into stir fry sauce (or just chili crisp, I used this sauce three days in a row on three different vegetables so I was trying to add variety today.) Mix corn starch with a few tablespoons of water. (you can also just do that in the bowl with the sauce, whatever.)
Stir fry your veg. Heat wok to smoking, natch. Add a bit of oil, enough. Add ginger, garlic if you want some whatever, not your dad. Add carrots, stir fry for a minute or so, add broccoli, stir fry for a minute or so. Lower heat. Add sauce, cook briefly. Move veg to the side of the pan, getting a well in the middle. Add water and corn starch, let thicken. Stir to coat everything. Add in tofu, cook a bit longer until everything is hot, cooked. Add sunchoke and turn off heat. Eat with rice. Two pot dinner.
If you’ve read to the end of this and still have some CSA stuff leftover, like, uh, RADISHES, or TURNIPS (is this just me? really radish heavy this year…) I want to share with you my hot tip for making turnips and/or radishes into something that I don’t hate eating. This will really blow your mind… it’s garlic butter. I’ve started just… making garlic butter and keeping a roll of it in the refrigerator. Slice radishes or turnips or whatever into a size that you like. Oven at 425. Put on a pan, drop garlic butter all over, add a bit more salt. Cook, toss once after about 10 minutes.
Here’s my approach for garlic butter:
Some quantity of room temperature butter, at least half a stick, but realistically it’s whatever I find lying around in the kitchen.
Garlic powder
Dried parsley
Dried dill
Gochugaru
MSG
White and/or black pepper
Dried ground bay leaf
Little bit of smoked paprika (not too much)
Salt
Tablespoon or so of olive oil
Smoosh everything together. Obviously, you know, ingredients to taste whatever. More garlic than the other stuff. More parsley than dill. The olive oil helps keep it from getting super solid in the refrigerator. Roll it up, put it in the refrigerator. Look! A little thing that makes turnips better.