Pasta with Browned Butter and Myzithra Cheese

Ingredients:

1 cup butter
1 cup Mizithra cheese
pasta of choice

Directions:
There is a terrific dish served by The Old Spaghetti Factory chain,
called Spaghetti with Browned Butter,. It is served topped with shredded
Mizithra cheese (a Greek hard cheese). If mizithra is not available (I
am able to easily locate it St. Louis at cheese shops and some
supermarkets), a blend of ricotta salata and romano is suggested

Browned Butter Procedure: Cut 2 sticks of butter into 8 pieces and place
in a 2-quart sauce pan. Place the pan of butter on a burner on medium
heat. Bring butter to a slow boil (about 5 minutes).

Once the butter begins to boil, stir constantly to prevent residue from
sticking to the bottom of the pan. As the butter cooks, it will start to
foam and rise. Continue stirring, otherwise the butter foam could
overflow (about 5 minutes) and catch fire.

Once the butter stops foaming and rising, cook until amber in color
(about 1 to 2 minutes). It will have a pleasant caramel aroma.

Turn off the heat and remove pan from burner. Let the sediment settle to
the bottom of the pan for a few minutes.

Pour the brown butter through a strainer into a small bowl. Do not
disturb the residue at the bottom of the pan.

The brown butter can be stored in the refrigerator and reheated in a
microwave as needed.

Boil the pasta of choice until Al Dente. Drain pasta and divide into
four servings. Spread 1/4 cup of Mizithra over each pasta serving. Top
with 1/4 cup of hot brown butter.

Recipe Location:
http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/23/Spaghetti_with_Burnt_Butter38272.shtml
Recipe ID: 28580

This recipe is from CDKitchen http://www.cdkitchen.com/
© 1995-2006 CDKitchen, Inc.

Pasta Salad

I felt like making a pasta salad this week. Originally, I more felt like Browned Butter and Myzithra Cheese Pasta, but this craving sort of mutated. Anyway:

-Rotini, chilled.
-Black Olives
-Mushrooms
-1/4 Round Onion
-2 Roma Tomatoes
-3 Strips crumbled bacon
-3 good slices of Myzithra Cheese, crumbled.

drizzle over pasta a dressing of Olive Oil and Balsamic Vinegar.
Chill for about an hour.

We Are Not Fish. I Am Sad.

Well, they turned on the big physics machine called the Large Hadron
Collider today. Some people thought there was a possibility of the
device doing something odd, most likely creating a black hole capable of
eating either France (if Hawking Radiation exists) or Earth (if not).
There was also an outside chance of something super-cool called a
"Critical Existence Failure" which basically means the Universe throws a
BSOD.

The problem comes from the fact that scientists often suck at PR. You
see, according to quantum theory, you can't actually rule out the above
possibilities. ANY GIVEN SECOND, there is a non-zero, but really, really
low chance that we all turn into fish, for instance. This is the
probability level of the LHC making a black hole that eats us all. It's
really, really low. I mean REALLY low, not win-the-lottery low, but
accidentally-walking-through-walls-instead-of-into-them low.

I can live with that.

Really, I could live with everyone dying from black hole annihilation
too. You see, according to most theory, there's actually time
compression as we collapse into the black hole, so while the folks on
Arcturus or what not can watch it happen in realtime and upload it to
the Universal Darwin Awards, from where we're standing, it feels like it
takes ten million years for the world to collapse in on itself. I
presume throughout that time, we'd just live our lives normally, but it
would really suck to get to that end point.