How Make Quick, Easy and Tasty Pasta

I enjoy cooking, but except on the weekends, I'm hard-pressed for time and energy. I also enjoy eating, but most things that don't require time and energy usually require a microwave, and those are usually devoid of taste and/or nutrition. Over many, many, many months of many, many, many meals of pasta, I think I have found a happy medium.

The first trick is to boil a good amount of pasta when you do have time and energy. I do it on the weekends - just dump a whole bunch into a pot and boil. (Instructions are on the pasta boxes, usually.) KEEP IN MIND: you need to have storage for all the pasta you boil. The first time, I boiled about a third of a box, but only when it was done realized that I didn't have adequate storage facilities. I ended up having to use very large sandwich bags (which actually worked out quite well) and throwing away the rest. :-(

The second important component is ready-made pasta sauce. Buy the kind you like. I know Classico (the brand I use) has a whole range with vegetables and meat mixed in, but (as I will explain shortly) I prefer buying the plain kind.

Now here is where you choose your destiny. You can simply microwave the pasta and sauce, and eat it. This is probably the quickest, easiest way. However, a small amount of time and effort can result in a much tastier (and I think more nutritious) meal. I am listing the choices that can be taken in order of ease. I think taste and nutrition increase exponentially with each choice.

Saute the pasta and sauce together - It's probably better to have both the pasta and sauce heated a little bit before you do this.
Toss them both in a frying pan and mix them together at low heat, for about 5-10 minutes. I'm not sure what this does, (the sauce gets absorbed by the pasta?) but it makes it taste pretty good. You can add some olive oil to the mix (I usually heat the oil a little before I put the stuff in) which greatly increases the taste, but might diminish the nutritional value.

Chop some vegetables, saute them in olive oil, cook the sauce and pasta with them - This choice is a little involved, but worth it. This why I buy the plain sauce - I can add (fresh) veggies and meat of my choice.

1. Chop up the vegetables, in the sizes you want (I usually use onions, green peppers, mushrooms).
   
2. Warm up some olive oil in a frying pan and when it's warm (I toss a little piece of onion in. If it starts frying, it's good) put the veggies in.
   
3. Saute them for a while (I wait till the onion seems to get a little golden-brown).
   
4. Add the sauce and pasta and mix that around for about 5-7 minutes on low/medium heat.

Add meat to the above mix- I've only done this so far with chicken.

1. Take a breast and grill it on a George Foreman (I'll put an article on how to do that soon, I still need to perfect it). You can grill it with seasoning if you want.
2. Once it's done, cut it into small pieces (not bigger than an inch squared, shape doesn't really matter).

The remainder of the process is identical to the process in the above paragraph, except you add the chicken to the veggies. I added seasoning in this step once, too, and it was pretty good. The only variation I use in this method is instead of adding the pasta and sauce at the same time once the vegetables and meat are done, I add the sauce first, cook that for a few minutes and then add the pasta. I don't know much it matters, but it seems a little easier to manage (for me). You can also add pre-cooked sausages instead of chicken. I know you can do ground beef, too, but I haven't tried that yet.

Summary -

Ingredients needed:

• Pasta (already boiled)
  
• Pasta sauce
  
• Olive Oil
  
• Vegetables and meat
  
• Chicken seasoning
  

Time: 5 minutes to 15 minutes (approx, not including pasta boil time)

Joost Review

I got my Joost invite today, and so very rapidly set out out to test drive it.

What is Joost?

What it really is (on the surface), is a collection of video clips organized by channel in a standalone player. What makes it unique and revolutionary is it's method of distributing the content - it uses P2PTV (according to Wikipedia). So instead of streaming content from a server, users stream from one another in a Kazaa-like fashion. That is where I think they are trying to differentiate themselves from traditional online video distribution networks - you don't need a whole bunch of servers, the network serves itself.

Interface

The Joost interface is pretty slick. The window is filled with whatever show you are watching, and when you move your cursor to any edge, four "buttons" come up.

• The Channel List - Clicking this brings up the list of channels
  
• "Interactive Information About This Program" - A description of the show, a URL and other shows on that channel
  
• "My Joost" - This is a section that has Joost "Widgets" (a Notice Board, News Ticker, an IM widget, a Clock, a 'Rate It' widget and a Channel Chat)
  
• The Control Bar for the video clip - You can pause the show, move to the next program in the channel lineup, get information about that show and that channel and also search for shows. The search feature is pretty cool. I'm not sure what it searches, maybe the shows have some metadata embedded in them, but I was able to find some interesting stuff.
  

The interface is minimal and simplistic, which is good for the most part. The button to go back in a series of menus could be more prominent, but other than that it's pretty good.

One feature (which may be good or bad, depending on your tastes) is that the show keeps playing while you browse through menus. You can of course pause the show while you browse through menus.

Usually the first menu I go to in any application is the "Options"/"Preferences" and it's really important to me how much control and flexibility I have. Most of the options are for changing the times and delays for GUI features. The others are your standard "Start in Full Screen", "Tooltip delay" etc. I haven't played around with them too much, but it seems to offer a good degree of flexibility.

Performance

The quality wasn't bad. I'm not sure what resolution they are advertising, but it was very watchable. There was some stalling, but it was far short of being even mildly irritating. It might have been because I'm on wireless, or some other traffic on my laptop. On the whole, quite smooth.

It takes between 30% and 50% (usually in the high 40s) of my Turion 1.8 GHz and about 70 MB of RAM. The network usage fluctuated from 50 KBps to 150 KBps, averaging around 100.

Content

Joost has a healthy dose of content right now. Among many others - some indie movies, an MTV channel, Nat Geo, Fifth Gear, some RHCP stuff and (joy of joys) a Paris Hilton channel with two shows. With Viacom coming on board, this can only get better.

Other thoughts

Joost is ad supported. The ads are usually played before the show (I haven't encountered any show where the ads were in the middle of the show).

Besides the fact that it is over a distributed network, the major news with Joost is that users cannot upload their own content. This was really what makes Youtube et al what they are, so I'm not sure if Joost is competing with them in that respect. What Joost is providing is an infrastructure for large, traditional content providers to distribute their content over the Internet in a secure and controlled manner. It really is like on-demand TV for the Internet. Everything that is done on traditional TV - movies, shows, videos - can be done on Joost. If it's ad-supported, then users can watch the shows whenever and wherever, without having to pay. It's streaming, so content providers aren't worried about copyrights. It seems like a win-win situation.

Allow me to introduce myself

I've been blogging for a while, even before "blogging" became the buzzword that it is today.

My first blog was just an html page that I kept adding to, as and when I found something worth sharing. That wasn't even a "blog" by modern standards - no dates or timestamps, no catchy titles and certainly no tags or comments. But the idea was the same - things that I knew or found or had thought up that I wanted to share with the world at large.

My first "real" blog started out in the summer of 2003 as a way for me to keep people informed about my summer internship at Bloomberg, so I wouldn't have to send out emails or repeat stories - just point them to my blog. It evolved from that into a place I would rant and ramble, share links, post anecdotes; just like Every Other Blog. Around the summer of 2004, it became more of a 'pensieve' where I would vent to get things off my chest, articulate them so as to think about them more clearly and also just record them for posterity It was around this point that the blog became more personal and I stopped linking it everywhere. I was writing things that I didn't want shared with the world at large. There were a few people who still read the blog, but they were people close enough to me that I would probably tell them those things anyways.

For reasons not yet ascertained, the blogging wound down. I very, very rarely posted. It was usually reserved for severe introspection or extremely humorous links.

The idea for this new blog started fermenting when Hemant and I started talking about starting up a blog with a whole bunch of people that was sort of like a news magazine - we each wrote about our fields of expertise. It received a boost when Tarun and I were talking about how we 'consume' (figuratively, though in his case, literally as well ;-)) so much every day that we really should start documenting it. We use websites and software, hack OSes, read books, watch movies etc. etc. While many others may do or consume the same things, it is our perspective that makes our experience unique. Sure, there are thousands of people who probably tried to (e.g.) get a Radeon 9200 to work on a Ubuntu installation. But one's experience in doing it is as unique as onself - the Linux experience we have, the thought process we use, the base install that we did, so on and so forth. When we watch a movie, no two people view in exactly the same way. The impact the movie has on them is as different as their genetic code i.e. unique. The final straw that made me actually create this blog was a Joost invite. I figured that was as a good a time as any to start posting about my everyday experiences with everyday things.

I envision this blog to be just what the domain suggests - a day in my life. It's about things that many other people do or experience or read or see, but a thing that is also unique, since it was a part of a day in my life. My thoughts on an Obama speech, Joost's latest beta release, a movie I watched, a program I used, a lifehack I implemented, a route to Ikea that I took. Anything that other people do all the time, but that is made unique by my perspective and experience.

The title alludes to the fact that I couldn't think up a creative one, so I just blamed in on the CBSE (the schooling system I went through).