suanie’s great cook out
After the general election results, I decided to prepare an impromptu dinner for some of my friends because no one was at home at that day and we always need to eat.
So me and KY went to Tesco and bought some essential stuff, then went back to my place to prepare dinner.
1. Marinating minced beef with Prego pasta sauce for a couple of hours before cooking. You didn’t think that I was actually going to make pasta sauce from scratch, did you? I wouldn’t know how anyway.
2. Giving the capsicums, cucumbers, tomatoes and carrots a thorough washing.
3. Salada! Lovely colours.
4. Poser me with uncooked spaghetti. For some reason, Tesco ran out of other brands and had only their home brand. You know the argument that home brands are cheaper and taste the same as other brands anyway? Well, we found out that it does not apply for spaghetti.
Me, cook extraordinaire (not)
Spongefox tossing the salad
Dreemo serving Kerol
KY, Kelvin, wah jai and Michelle eating leaves
For dessert we had sweetened, ready-to-eat cincau and ice-cream potong that Kelvin bought. Nicholas and WenQi came by for a while, we watched a weird Japanese movie. It’s all good.
But spaghetti are spaghetti, the taste are not much different, isn’t it? When come to spaghetti, different spaghetti has different cooking time. It the instructions say 15 minutes in boiling water, stick to it. For springy feel, minus 2 minutes, for softer noddle, add 2-5 minutes.
BTW, Tesco home brand quality are so so.
Prego??? lol In Australia that means Pregnant. Did everyone who ate your food get a little Prego?
Or a LOT Prego??? 
‘You didn’t think that I was actually going to make pasta sauce from scratch, did you? ‘
Um … You don’t know how to boil tomatoes for an hour throwing in herbs and other things you want for flavour?????
KY, review that!
I love suanie’s spaghetti !!! yummyyyyyy….
So, when is the next round??? *slurps*
Tesco house brand is not too bad la…. I like their stewed tomatoes, mayo, flavored olive oil…. I wont recommend their biscuits though. Hehehehehe…
Anyway, the spaghetti look very yummy and I must say that it is a very good effort from Suanie… hehehehe…
recipe pls
I used to have this “perception” that house brands are el cheapo *hides in shame*, but now, in line wth the rise in price of all bloody products out there, I’ve switched to house brands to save moolah.
Notty Gurl, have you ever tried the Tesco cream crackers? They are yummy! Check the packaging, and you will realize that they are produced by Hwa Tai! (Batu Pahat ftwww! :D)
Everyone knows that the better local biscuits are produced by Hwa Tai / Munchy
:D
Hmm, maybe we can all share our experience in here as to local house brands. Can save money, summore can know which is good, and which arent!
I vote for Tesco cream crackers, and Tesco ice cream potong. (Jagung rocks!)
niahma! got cook fest tarak ajak me!!!! I can make wantan mee!!!
Tesco house brands are hit and miss, it depends who makes them. If you get the house brands made in UK they are good stuff.
But yeah some things you are better off skipping if there’s only house brand, pop to your local kedai runcit and pick up whatever over-priced nonsense they have.
Whoat? You finished an Italian meal with ready-to-eat cincau and ice-cream potong? That is potong stim la! Next time call me and I’ll teach you how to make authentic tiramisu from scratch!
Hmm..their face don’t look too happy eating the salad. Not a vege person?
Suan,
What camera did you use? Great Shots… Aiya, how come u din invite me 1?
There can be a huge difference in pastas, and spaghetti is no exception. Want the best - pay the price, like everything!
San Remo is a decent supermarket brand.
Best is to make your own - the difference is truly amazing!!
Extractfrom an on-line article:
But why do these noodles work so well? One reason is obvious once you look closely
enough: The surface of the raw artisanal noodles are rough, rather than smooth. This is true
in varying degrees; the Latini noodles were by far the roughest, almost to the point of being grainy.
After the starches have swelled during cooking, the difference isn’t so obvious. But it’s still
enough to allow the spaghetti to hold more sauce, amplifying its flavor.
Dried pastas have had their ups and downs. For a period in the 1980s, they were scoffed at
by foodies as inferior to fresh. That is over. Since the ’90s, exports of Italian dried pasta,
already high to begin with, have continually increased.
It’s important to recognize that dried pastas are not fresh pastas that have been dehydrated. Except for dried egg noodles, which are a very small part of the market, dried pastas are made from different ingredients, in a different way. Fresh pastas are made from eggs and soft wheat flour ground from the seeds of the wheat variety Triticum vulgare and are rolled out.
Dried pastas are made from water and hard semolina flour ground from Triticum durum and are extruded–or pressed through dies.
In fact, by Italian statute, dried pastas can contain nothing but semolina and water. With
many Italian firms opening factories in the United States to manufacture the noodles, one way
to tell if it’s the real thing is to read the ingredient labels. If they contain additions such as
niacin, iron or folic acid, they were probably made in America, not Italy, even if the label
reads “Italy’s No. 1 Pasta.”
Of course, there’s nothing inherently superior about Italian-made pastas. In fact, many of
them have their roots in America. Though Italy is the world’s leading producer of durum wheat,
it cannot grow enough to keep up with the world’s hunger for Italian noodles. This year Italy
will import about 650,000 tons of durum wheat from the U.S.–more than half of what is grown in
the country.
The secret to great pasta isn’t just the material it’s made from, it’s also the way it is made. That
is a process that has been refined over hundreds of years and is still being refined today.
First, the flour and the water are kneaded together. If you have ever tried to do this at home, especially using gluten-rich semolina flour, you know how difficult it can be.
This, perhaps predictably, went nowhere. More successful was a water-powered
kneading machine introduced in Naples at about the same time that used a series of
paddles mounted on rods.
Once the dough is formed, it must be pressed through dies and cut into shapes. Originally, the
dies were cut out of wood, then bronze. Teflon dies, which were introduced in the ’70s,
were considered a major advance because they were much easier to clean and, because of
the reduced friction, kept the dough cooler.
After the noodles have been cut into shapes, they must be dried. This is not nearly as simple
as it seems. Moisture evaporates only from the surface, and once the surface of a noodle
has dried out it hardens, preventing the moisture from the interior from evaporating. Left to its
own devices in a stable climate, pasta would form a dry crust around the outside and leave
the interior wet, prone to acidification and hospitable to unfriendly bugs.
It takes a combination of drying & moistening for pasta to dry thoroughly. With industrialization, pasta makers began to use two closed rooms, one hot and dry and one cooler and more humid. Today’s factories have streamlined that process with climate controlled drying chambers that operate much faster.
Technologies used in cutting and drying pasta are at the heart of the differences between
artisanal and mass-market spaghetti today.
The rough surface of the artisanal pastas, which help to make them so friendly to sauces, are created by the old-fashioned bronze dies. The new Teflon ones may speed production, but they also make a noodle that is too slippery to grip sauce in the same intimate way.
Less well-known is the difference in drying technology. While modern methods can dry pastas
in less than four hours using temperatures around 185 degrees, most artisanal makers favor an old-fashioned process that takes nearly two days to dry the pasta at between 105 and 115 degrees.
The debate between the two factions is quite heated itself. The new ways, the Latinis say, result in “nonexistent flavors and aromas and a standardized ‘plasticized’ pasta.”, however, the industrialists slap back, saying, “the use of low temperatures in drying pasta … not only has no sense at all, but is an absurdity from the productive point of view.”
Teh dinner was pretty good, but as usual, Suan over cooked and there were still massive amounts of food leftover.
Dree was complaining the whole night about overeating and threaten never to have spaghetti ever again.
And Suan, when will you ever stop linking me to spongefox ? = X
moo_t: yah but there was a noted difference lor . my first batch of spaghetti was undercooked, heheh.
dabs: not at all :O
GS: he ate quite a bit
sotong: you cook la ar
Notty Gurl: Yeah i Love their house brand chocolate powder. Thanks
frostier: prego spaghetti sauce, spaghetti. cook.
sharon: heh me too, but sometimes if i’m buying stuff, i’d get house brands. e.g. dishwashing liquid. but detergent for washing clothes must be dynamo.
wingz: really? terrornyer
ST: there was a time when i bought tesco house brand stuff, and the expiry dates were frightfully near. imported la i guess.
dean: fusion mah. got ikan bilis some more
simon: ya i forced it down their sorry throats
joe: nokia n95!! cos you wouldn’t be free, and it was random anyway
Grant S: they didn’t have san remo, and i can’t be arsed to learn how to make fresh spaghetti
spongefox: NEVAR!