Cooking With Cloudflare

Hello everybody, it is 5 30 in California and it is 8 30 in New Jersey. There we go. Okay, my name is Chaat Butsunturn and my co-host today, Watson Ladd.

Hi, we're actually both based out of the San Francisco office, although this is our first time meeting, so a pleasure to meet you, Watson.

Pleasure to meet you too, Chaat.

I'm on the research team, which team are you on? I'm on the sales team, right?

And I work in the business development group and I've been with Cloudflare for a few years now and this is going to be a fun, interesting experiment.

I've been really digging this Cloudflare TV.

Yeah, no, there have been some great segments already.

And what is, I think you've already done one, is that right? I've already been on a few times, so I hosted a segment to really mess up Kate's computer, where Cloudflare engineers share some of the stories from when they make mistakes like everybody does.

I've also been on Silicon Valley Squares. By the way, I'm bending down to meet our silent guest star, Darby.

There he is. Come on Darby, say hello.

All right. Okay, so today on the menu, we are making a Caesar salad from scratch, as well as a penne pasta.

Yep, that's right. So it's going to be penne pasta with a red pepper and cream sauce.

So here's the red peppers. Let's go through our ingredients list for both of them.

Start with yours. All right, so the ingredients are, for the sauce, we have heavy whipping cream or heavy cream, okay, and red peppers, and some cannoli nuts.

Now your recipe adapts to a lot of substitutions.

If you don't want a, you can have walnuts and blue cheese instead, or you could switch out those peppers for sun-dried tomatoes, and it will still work.

What we're doing is we're making a cheese sauce to carry the flavor of the peppers or the tomatoes or whatever you have, all through the pasta.

And the nuts are there to provide a little bit of texture, and would otherwise be a very bland and creamy experience.

Gotcha, all right. And then you said, what kind of cheese, parm?

We're looking at parm? Parmesan cheese, anything, it's just there to thicken and to homogenize the mixture.

Okay, all right, well I think I'm set on that.

And then for the Caesar, our homemade Caesar, this is what we're gonna need.

We're gonna need, it goes on my list, need some garlic. I've got that. All right, gonna need some anchovy.

I've got, I've got that. Okay, great, anchovy. We're gonna need one egg yolk, so we're gonna, one egg, one egg yolk, right, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll do the fun separation of the egg, all right, so we got the egg.

Gonna need, oh, you know what I forgot to mention to you, Watson, do you have any Tabasco?

I do indeed. All right. Let's see if I've still got it. Do a dash of that, dash of Tabasco.

All right, dash of Tabasco. I'll do a couple drops of Worcestershire sauce, all right, great.

I'm going with the off-brand fish sauce instead.

Okay, a dollop of mustard, you got that? Preferably a Dijon of sorts. Lemon?

I gotta go with vinegar, you didn't have lemons. All right, yeah, we'll try that, we'll try that substitution.

And this lemon's from our tree outside, so I'm pretty stoked to have a lemon tree, and it happens to be bearing fruit right now.

And lastly, olive oil.

All right, so where shall we start? Why don't, why don't we start with getting your, getting your pasta together?

Right, so the first step in any pasta recipe that has a pasta and a sauce is to start the wok, is getting the water for the pasta.

All right, here we go. Here we go. Now there's a lot of mythology about pasta.

Just enough to boil all the pasta?

Is that how much water I need? That's how much water you need.

Now, some people will say that you need even more water, and some people will say that you need to be very careful to bring it to a boil before adding the pasta.

And some people will say that, you know, that you need to add salt, or you need to put olive oil on the top.

And the fact is, there's any of the ways you could work.

It's just about heating up the pasta for a moment. Okay, so I like to salt my water.

Is that something you do too? Add salt to the water when you boil it, your pasta?

People do, but you don't have to. So the one thing you do have to do is, if you're, if you, if for this recipe we're cooking it a little undercooked, because it's going to cook more later.

Okay, so mine says, how much? Add sea salt.

Okay, coarse sea salt. I think I have coarse sea salt. Doesn't matter what kind of salt you have.

It's true. It's true. Okay, so this is cooked approximately 12 minutes.

So maybe I'll cook it for eight, for 10? No, 10 would be better.

Okay, the degree of doneness you want. Got it. So I was going to say, the one thing that matters is, if your pasta has a time on it, then adding it when it's boiling is when they measure the time.

And if it, if you don't, if you do something different, then you're going to have to taste it more often.

Now my pasta cooks in five minutes.

So all right, so now we've got our pasta sitting ready.

Next thing we can do, well, oh, I should probably add some salt then.

That would work. Add some salt. We have all, I have all, I have all kinds of salt.

I'm going to show you my favorite salts. Of course, got to have kosher salt.

But I also have sea salt. But my favorite salt, Maldon.

But this stuff, I don't use it in water. I use this like on, on meats, on fish.

It's a coarse salt. You know, it looks like, looks like so, I don't know if you can see it.

Oh, beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, that's what you want to show your guests.

So a lot of people talk about the flavor difference of salt. It's all the same stuff.

But a coarse thing like, like kosher salt, you can pick it up and measure with your fingers.

That sea salt, that coarse, how do you measure it? You just want to sprinkle it?

You can't. There you go. Boom. All right. Oh, opening up a new salt.

I'm going to salt my water. Here's an action shot of me salting water. All right, that should be good.

I don't know if you can see the grains of salt as they are pouring from here into the, well, I'm going to be using the salt shaker, just a cable one, raking it back and forth, adding a little, can't hurt.

One trick that some people do, and I've done on occasion, is add a little olive oil to try and coat the pasta as it goes in, keep it from sticking.

I don't know that that works actually.

But we're just, I was just sitting here. It's going to take a while for it to come up to the boil.

So we can now start chopping some peppers we're going to use in the sauce.

Okay. So now I want to like, you said start chopping up my peppers?

Yeah, what? All right, here we go.

Some action shot of the chopping here. I wish I had a zoom on my zoom so you could see me chopping.

Oh, this is interesting.

We have one hour. This is kind of like Iron Chef. Let's, now I'm staring at some of the camera, read laptop angles.

Am I doing the whole jar?

Depends how much pasta you got.

How much do you like peppers? All right, well, score one sticky jars.

So I'm going to show you a trick. You got this jar and you want to open the vacuum.

Just slide a knife up in there and hear it hiss.

And you're letting, and there it goes. Heard that, I heard something.

Yeah, so just sliding the knife right up in there, darn a lot easier to open.

Now I've broken the seal. It comes right off. Oh, look at this. All right. Got some chopping action here.

How do I want to chop this? Like dice it? Of course it's finer than dice.

Like I would say, I was, I can't remember the next two. It's chopped and there's one more.

Oh, I mentioned, I'm going to crack open a bevy. Tonight it's Friday, so I'm going with a hazy IPA.

How far down the pine tree route is it?

Here, what's that again? How far down the pine tree route is it?

How far down the... The pine tree route. The country route. Yeah, some of these IPAs I find are very hoppy.

Oh, great. Yeah. I'd say this is a mild and fruity one, actually.

Oh, wow.

This is, I can just, I'll probably just do all of these peppers. So, according to the kitchen safety rule, keep your knives sharp.

Yes. You're not having to drag your knife back and forth.

It's time to sharpen it. Now, last, I don't have a sharpener with me, or I'll be showing you all how to do it.

And another trick, how do you best hold your knives?

It's like a tool. You got to put your hand right up on it.

Right. Right. And the other thing is your fingers. Yeah, you're doing it right.

You're doing it right. Keep careful of the fold. You want to be right up there.

I like to use my knuckles sometimes. So, you can be a little, you know, not to worry about my fingertips as much, you know.

And you're slicing through them.

Fine little slices. All right.

Pretty good. Slicey dicey. All right.

This is looking pretty, pretty well.

Uh, can I set this aside now? Yep, set it aside.

We're going to need it when the pasta boils. So, this recipe is a very, very, um, you know, there's a bit of starch, and a bit of waiting, and a bit at the end.

Right. There's a recipe in that. Okay, so I've got my, I'll put that to the side over here.

I'm going to give my cutting board a quick rinse, because I want to use it again.

I want to use it again, then I'm going to go rinse mine, too.

All right, well.

I usually dry it off, but I'm going to, because, uh, I just want to.

How many cutting boards am I going to need?

Yeah. All right. Great. Okay. Step one is done. All right.

So, Trapp, how big a cutting board am I going to need? I think, um, just one cutting board for what we're going to do with the Caesar.

Are we moving on to Caesar for now, for a minute?

What's that? Let's move on to Caesar. Okay, first thing we're going to do is the garlic.

So we probably take a couple of cloves of garlic.

A couple of cloves, you said? All right. Yeah, or it could even be like one mammoth.

It's going to add a little bite to it. Basically, your Caesar is going to have somewhere between, you're going to have the garlic, the anchovy, and the lemon.

And you want to find that balance between all of those, right? So I'm going to start with the garlic.

Where's my, I had another garlic here. Oh yeah, here we go.

How much garlic should I use? One, two. I'm going to start with two cloves of garlic, so.

Here's my garlic. What I like to do, what I do with my knife, there you go.

I'm just going to take the peel off, right?

Now, I'm a big Caesar fan. And this recipe is from my friend, Adam Zolot.

He's a genius cook. And he recently, when COVID struck, started doing Zoom cooking classes for his friends online.

And that was super fun.

So that's where this recipe is from. Adam Zolot, I think his cooking handle is the landscape architect.

Clever him. All right, so now what I like to do is I use one of these.

You're still on the peeling of the cloves. These skins want to stay on.

You know what you do? Because we're going to, Watson, what we're going to do is, they're going to get smashed anyway.

So what I like to do is take the side of your knife, smash it, and then it's easier to shed the skin.

We don't have to have a nice, clean, nicely shaped, you know, this thing's all going to get mashed anyway.

So you may as well start now, right? So with this tool, you can either mince, or you can put it through a garlic press.

I've got one of these tools, which is kind of fun.

Watch this. I'll wait for Watson then. Are you ready? I'm ready.

Okay, so with this tool, and you could use any kind of garlic press or whatever.

I'm just going to go, all right, boom. And now I've got the beginning of my...

Nice. But you can mince it with your knife, just make it easy like that. This gets, this just gets it on the start, right?

So now it's going to get a little bit tricky here, because I'm going to switch to this bowl.

But I want to make sure you all can see what's happening.

So let me see how I can elevate this thing. All right, I don't have that kind of tools.

I'm stuck here mincing. Mince away, mince away.

Our water's boiling, so we've got, we've got time. I'm taking, I'm just going to show our friend here.

We're all friends, right?

There you are. So I'm going to take my garlic and just put it in the, put it in the bowl where I'm going to make my, my Caesar dressing, right?

All right, so there we go. How's the mincing going, Watson?

Good, just rock the knife back and forth on that little curved bit.

There you go. It's saving me a lot of time.

We may add more garlic later. It's again, it's to taste.

So when you're done with that, and you put it in your bowl, our next step is going to be anchovy.

I'll get one more folding.

Right? Yeah, you generally want to use two. You could use, you know, if they're, it depends on the size, right?

I mean, sometimes people say like two cloves, but like cloves come in all kinds of sizes.

So what do you do, right?

Well, here's my garlic. Next thing I'm going to do, get my anchovies, right?

Now, I don't know if you, I really like anchovies.

And they add certainly a salt character, but there's that element of the fish.

They're not fishy. It's just, I don't know, it's like saltiness, but with a certain character to it.

And some people put anchovies on their caesars afterwards.

If you really like anchovy, highly recommend it. Go ahead and just throw your anchovy on there, on the salad afterwards.

For now, we're going to start with it in the dressing.

It's all Caesar should have. How's the garlic going?

Good? I like, yeah, I got enough for now. So now I'm going to, I'm going to proceed with the putting of the anchovy into the bowl, right?

So here's one fillet.

Let's see here. I got two fillets. I'm going to do three fillets of garlic.

Sorry, I mean, fillets of garlic, fillets of anchovy.

You just pop it open and there you go. All right. So put in three anchovies in your bowl, right?

All right. Let's see what I got here. I've got three of them.

And here's the thing. You can pre mash or cut your anchovies if you want. What I'm going to do is with the garlic and the anchovy, I'm going to take a couple of forks.

I'm just going to start mashing this together with the garlic and kind of use each fork to mash it into the other.

And we're just going to kind of mash this into a paste.

So we can just go ahead and do that. Ooh, this dinner sounds good.

Pasta with a Caesar. That's great. Just want to get into a paste together.

I suppose you could, I don't know if you could mortar and pestle it or whatever, but I'm just going to like mash these together and try to get them together into a paste.

And I forget what this is called when you get into a paste. And then you add this, like this, the egg yolk will come next, which will be kind of like our coagulating agent.

And there's a term for it that I'm not remembering now. Let's see here.

We got that. Looking pretty good. But you can see what it looks like.

All right. Yeah, I'm getting there. You see that?

Yep. Oh yeah. Yeah. Mash that together. Just blend it all up. We're getting into a paste.

My water is starting to boil, by the way.

Great. Your pasta takes longer to cook than mine.

So you, good thing. So is it, what stage of boiling is it? It's a rolling boil, but it's not hella rolling.

It's starting to roll. So maybe we wait. Here, I'll show you actually.

Look at this. I can show you. That's good enough. I mean, so you're going to want to taste the pieces as you get closer to being cooked through anyway.

Okay. You should have done this. Now that we've got, how's your paste going?

Okay. Yep. I got some little bits of garlic.

I got mashed through the fork. Mine too. Because here's the thing. You want to mash it up pretty good because otherwise when your dressing is done, you're going to get some chunky bits in there that might be, you know, it adds a little bite, but you never want to get a bite that's, that bites you back too hard.

You know, it's, so there's a balance that we're trying to achieve.

And the better it's mashed together, the more balanced every bite will be.

Okay.

So now let's separate an egg. You ever done that? Twice. Not too successfully.

Right. Well, this is kind of a fun thing. Now I like to, I never like to waste an egg, right?

So I'm going to take my whites and save it, save it in this little jar here.

And, you know, I'll just add a little egg white into my ramen. If I have a like top ramen or something where I can just throw it in with my scramble.

I don't like egg white scramble. So I'll just add it into another regular egg.

So let me see if I can show you what this is kind of like. Set this aside. I'll separate the egg and then I'm going to put my pasta in.

So how are you doing? I got, I mean, I can always come back and keep pasting it.

I mean, we're going to be pasting it.

I think, I think we're, we're, we're, I'm sure we're pasty enough. So now I'm going to take the egg.

Cause like, God, I can't believe it's already 554. We've got like 35 minutes, which won't be a problem, but take the egg and I'm going to actually, I should do it over my bowl.

Cause what I'm going to do when I crack the egg is right.

I just cracked my egg. Now, look at this. Here comes the yolk on the white.

I'm going to separate, separate this. It just kind of does it on its own. I don't know if you can see, but wow, look at that.

So they crack it open. The key is you want to, there we go, get my, get my whites out.

All right. So here's my yolk. You don't see that.

Here's the, here's the egg white. Here's my yolk. And I'm going to throw my yolk in there.

Boop, bop, there it is. And now that the yolk's in there, I'm going to put in a pasta at 555.

And I'm going to set my timer for 10 minutes. Now for Watson's suggestion, I got a penne pasta.

And you can probably use any pen, but this is the stuff that we got from our local grocery.

Yeah, any brand, the shape is what matters.

You want a shape that's going to stand up to some seriously thick sauce.

So if you try doing this with angel hair, it's not going to work. The pasta's just going to do all sorts of stuff.

There's a penne, look at that too. Got a little texture to it, right?

There we go.

Turn around a little bit.

And set my timer, 10 minutes. Okay, so now I've got my pasta going.

You can see the yolk's in there. I'm going to use the fork again to just do this thing here.

This part actually goes pretty fast here.

Once you get your egg yolk, it really starts to coagulate there, right?

Yep, all right. There's so much time to make this table side.

I haven't done this enough to feel like I got it that fast. But once you get the yolks in there and you mash in your, you feel like pretty good about your garlic mash.

I was looking over there, Watson, with your, uh, I think that's the yolks.

Put it all together, scrape the bowl down.

Sweet. All right, so now we should have a paste of garlic, anchovy, and egg yolk, right?

And the next, how's it look, you got that? Yep, I sure do.

All right, so here's where we do the next pieces, right? So we're going to take some Tabasco, put in a dash or two, not too much, right?

There we go. Oh, I heard it.

Nice sound effect. Now I'm going to put my Worcestershire, put in like a drop or two.

There you go, right? Then, Harvey, it's not, that's a piece of plastic from the bottle.

Just, just a, you know, we don't need that much Worcestershire.

It's just like a little bit of a character.

It adds a, it's part of the flavor profile, right? Yep. Strain my noodles.

That's good. Great. All right, and now I'm going to take, probably, if you want to measure it, I would say you could do like anywhere between a quarter to a half teaspoon of Dijon mustard, or as I like to call it, a little dollop, right?

I'll measure it, see what it looks like.

I'm going to try, I'll start with a quarter and see what it looks like.

Yeah, quarter teaspoon should be plenty.

Yep. And then, as you might imagine, mix it in.

Hey, hon. Hi, how you doing? Good. Are you teaching now?

I am. Well, he's teaching me the penne and I'm teaching him the Caesar. I didn't know that was part of it.

That's great. Well, we started winging it because we figured we had an hour to fill.

Great. Okay, stirring that together. All right. Dijon mustard.

Can you tell if I'm doing anything?

Nope, I'm good. All right. And so now, you know, it's pretty fast to mix that part up, right?

Oh, yeah. Now we're going to add like the juice of a half lemon, right?

So I'm going to cut this. The juice is half a lemon.

Yeah. And it's going to kind of show you. You can use your hands, whatever.

You can use a lemon squeezer. You don't need to use a lemon squeezer, but because I have one, I'm going to and it'll keep the seeds from going in.

Now, you don't want too much, but let's see how.

I'm going to go over that a little bit.

That's all right. I cut it with oil or more romaine. Oh.

Oh, you can smell that lemon. Now, I know you don't have a lemon. So what are you trying again?

Instead, you're going to use some white wine vinegar. It's similarly aromatic.

It's interesting because you're going kind of with like a little Asian twist on this with a little bit of fish sauce and a little bit of the rice wine vinegar instead.

Look at the ingredients of your Worcester sauce. There's nothing in there, but anchovies and vinegar.

Now, you can see what it looks like now.

It's starting to get some body to it, right?

We've got the lemon. I had to sample one of my pastas just to make sure.

Oh, that's a good idea. Now, yours is taking a little longer.

You got that time. You don't have to worry about yours.

I don't remember exactly when I put mine in. I'm going to reach in with a wooden spoon.

Pick one out. Mine's definitely not ready yet. Yeah, you got a good five minutes left.

Good, because mine's getting closer. So we're almost ready with the Caesar salad.

So the last bit of the Caesar is we're going to be drizzling in some olive oil and continuing to mix, right?

So this is where if you have different kinds of olive oil, go with your good stuff.

Go with the good stuff here.

Oh, yeah. Some olive oil, you just want to use for cooking. Good stuff. Olive oil always, you know, it does spoil.

So you got to, like your more neutral oils, you've got to eat it or throw it out.

Yeah. And so versatile. Now, it's not great for frying things in because it's got such a low smoke point, such a strong flavor.

But for mixing into salad dressing, it's nothing better. Right. Sorry, I've got a little...

Let me move my pan here. I don't know if it makes it too loud for you to hear me.

But so here's the olive oil I'm using. That's kind of similar.

Check this out. I also have this thing here. Oh, nice. Whole box of olive oil.

This is a pretty good olive oil from California, right? And it fits in this handy little cabinet here next to our microwave.

Believe it or not, we didn't like build that cabinet to fit the olive oil, but it works great.

My pot is ready, I think.

Okay. Turn it off. Sample one last time, just to be sure. This is good to do the two dishes.

If we just done the one, we'd be like hanging out talking about the weather.

What is the weather like over there in New Jersey right now, actually?

It's hot. All right. Oh, I have a question here. Let's see here.

Hold on. Steve Radden from Austin, Texas asks, is there a particular store -bought Caesar dressing that y'all would recommend?

Just out of curiosity for the lazy, or it's not even lazy, it's something you don't have time.

Um, there are.

I'm actually a fan of this stuff here.

This is Romano Caesar dressing from Trader Joe's, from TJ's.

So for some store -bought, I like the TJ's Caesar. Thanks for that.

The Caesar dressing, the thing a little similar is, this is from Market Basket, is a lemon pecorino.

Same kind of fatty, protein-y thing with the pecorino, and the lemon flavor.

It's like a slightly more sharp Parmesan. And you have the lemon part of it.

Like, yeah, I can see that. Okay. You know, I'm going to start drizzling in some olive oil with the Caesar, right?

And you're going to continue to mix.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. I gotta take out one fork, just so I can have a nice, clear bowl. And how much, this is the tricky part, is like, how much olive oil do you actually add?

I don't really know. I wasn't told when I was making it. So I just think, do it until you feel like you've got some body.

But this is a part where you can actually begin to taste it, right?

So I'm going to, pardon me, but I'm going to, mmm, that's pretty good.

Yeah. And this is the point where you can say, like, do I need more anchovy?

Do I need a little more lemon? Do I need more garlic? It should feel like a good balance of all of those things.

And sometimes what you can do, instead of anchovies, is you can use the olive oil, or whatever oil they put this thing in, olive oil, and add it to your...

Ah, I forgot to reserve it.

That's a good idea. Right, because you never know, right? So you could use some of that, or you could just add another anchovy.

Oh, I got 18 seconds left on my pasta.

It's probably a good time for me to check it. Am I going to drain it?

I'm going to drain the pasta? Yeah, drain it, drain it. And I think my dressing just needs to sit a while, let the flavors mingle.

Okay, it's a little al dente.

That's okay? Great, it's going to cook more when we put the sauce in.

Actually, you know what I'm going to do is I'll...

Ooh, hot, ooh, hot.

Let's see if I can show you how al dente it is. Ah, hot. How do you see?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's up to you. I'll give it another chance. It's probably going to be hot.

So I'm going to guess that probably by the time this is done, we will have added a quarter cup of olive oil.

And we're just going to be drizzling in a quarter cup of olive oil.

And then your mustard on your other things. But yeah, it seems about right.

And if you want, you can again experiment with like, I'm going to add a little Tabasco.

I'm going to add another dash of Worcestershire or whatever it is that you're using.

But okay, I got to drain my pasta. Be right back. All right. Got my strainer.

Okay, there you go.

Now do not rinse that pasta.

Okay, I'm draining the pasta. All right, want to switch over to making the sauce?

Sure, yeah, it's a great idea. So put that pot back on low.

What do I do with the pasta? Just let it sit in the strainer? That's how you're done.

What's that? We're going to let it sit there. We're going to re-add it.

Okay. Now don't let the pot, so you got to have everything ready to go. Okay. And grab your stirring spoon.

And add the cream. Wait, I'm just adding cream directly into that pot?

Into that pot and start stirring. So I'm just stirring it over heat with nothing else in it?

No, you're going to add the other ingredients. Okay, so walk me through what am I putting in here?

Cream, then red peppers, and Parmesan cheese.

Okay, so let's see here. So I'm going to start with the, because I'll start with red peppers, in there.

And you said I want to stir it with a wooden spoon or something?

And you got to stir it. You're stirring it to keep the heat even, keep it from curdling.

And how much Parmesan cheese am I putting in here?

So the Parmesan cheese is going to be, you know, it doesn't matter too much, but the goal is to make, to thicken it, to mix in.

See how there's some red water on top and some cream below?

Your goal is to get those to mix.

All right. And Parmesan cheese is what lets them do that. All right.

So this here. Now for me, I am using freshly grated Parmesan. So. So Watson, if you wanted to add a protein to this, what do you do?

You put a sausage in there, put some meat in here?

What do you do? You couldn't do that. How do you see that working?

I mean, this recipe came out of a vegetarian cookbook. Now, another good kind of pasta sauce that I like, it would be chickpeas and tahini.

Now that requires a very robust pasta, something almost like thick, thick balls.

There's a certain kind of what they call Israeli couscous that can stand up to that.

That would be a very protein-y pasta dish.

Very thick, protein-y sauce with those chickpeas and the hummus.

Now, the bad part about making it is good luck cleaning tahini off stuff.

Wow, man, I can imagine. Yeah. Well, yeah, I'm seeing how this is starting to thicken up here with the cheese.

Yep. Let me show people what this looks like.

That's what it's looking like.

Now you want to stir until the cheese is melted in.

And for me, that's going to be a little bit more, a little bit more heat. And once you're at that stage where it's melted in and the peppers are the only thing that's really moving around, you put the pasta back in.

Okay, I think I want more cheese on here.

So I am in a meat -eating family. I'm half Filipino, half Thai, and pork was a staple of my diet growing up.

So my wife thinks I eat too much meat.

But I can only do so much vegetarian. So what I'm going to do is probably take a couple of...

We've got an Italian dish here.

So I'm making some classic Italian sausages. Just, you know, you don't have to be any fancy from the butcher.

You can, but you can find all kinds of good quality sausages.

Adele's, Farmani. All right.

I think it's time for me to go add my pasta back to the pot. I'm almost there.

All right. Hey, our time is looking pretty good. Pretty good. I think we're going to be able to enjoy some of our food together here.

Oh, yeah. Okay, yeah, I'll cut it.

Okay, this is looking good. Here's a sausage.

Yeah, I'm going to have an action shot of me cutting sausages here.

I've got a family of three, a nine -year-old boy growing, and myself and my wife.

Yeah, so I moved ahead to coating the pasta with the sauce, and I'll show you all.

This is what it's looking like. You can see it. You can just about see it coating the pasta real nicely.

The texture of the penne is really what lets the cream go in there, stick to it.

What I'm doing to make this a meat-friendly dish is I'm chipping the sausages, and I'm going to put them in a pan and just kind of brown them.

Yeah, go. There you are. All right. And then I'm going to add, so you can see here, I've got that lovely, there's the pasta, there's the penne or the sausage.

Now I'm going to add the pasta back into the sauce.

All right, here we go. Wow.

I just used two spoons, just scooped it up, put it in, really coat. And you see how nicely it coats that penne, coats the ridges, sticks to it.

Yeah, it is pretty good.

Look at that. Okay. And now the finishing touch. What's the finishing touch?

No lay nuts. Oh, the nuts, I see you had that at the end.

Okay, I'm looking at mine, and I want mine to be a little bit thicker in consistency, so I'm going to continue to add more parm.

Good idea. If you want it thicker, that'll do it.

Now, do you have liquid still at the bottom of the pan when you're pulling it up?

All told, I'm probably putting for a pound -ish of pasta, a cup of cream and a can of the, of the, what do you call it, the peppers.

I am probably using a good half cup of fresh-grated parmesan.

Don't tell your cardiologist. Okay, so now this is mixing it together.

I've got my, I am going to get my pine nuts. So how much pine nuts are you suggesting?

So, you know, you add a little, you scoop it through, you look.

I mean, you don't need to go wild. Pine nuts are, you know, very flavorful.

You know, a little sprinkling on. You can sprinkle it on when you're serving it.

I'm going to put in two tablespoons. Yeah, that should be enough. Because pine nuts are expensive.

Oh yeah. You want to make sure, do the best as you can, get them sustainably harvested.

Okay, that's looking good. All right. Now, if pine nuts are too dear for you, walnuts can work.

There's a variation, as I mentioned earlier, with walnuts and blue cheese.

This recipe is very robust in variation like that. I also want to thank my wife for preparing the lettuce, my romaine for the Caesar.

So we made the Caesar and we're pretty much dialed on it. So you'll see here, romaine.

It's the classic lettuce for a Caesar. Now here's something I didn't tell you.

You can get croutons. You can buy croutons. We didn't have enough time in this episode to make fresh croutons.

Or not fresh, but like homemade croutons.

These are homemade croutons. They're great. Now I'll just tell you what you do real quick.

You want to make homemade croutons, take a loaf of Italian, cut them up into pieces about yay big or whatever you want, right?

Get a frying pan, a big pan.

Put in about maybe a quarter cup of water. Hold on a second.

Got to stir the pasta. All right.

So let me show the audience what it is your wife was up to there. She was ripping up the romaine lettuce into manageable pieces.

I started with four leaves.

This is the romaine as it comes from the supermarket after you take it off.

And you're just going to take it, pick one up, and you're ripping it into little pieces.

Right. Salad size. Right. These are exercises you can do by hand or you can chop them if you like.

You can use your knife. Back to the croutons, we use half butter, half olive oil.

Olive oil will crisp things up, give you a nice texture.

Butter gives you some flavor profiles and depth. It's really good. Put your breadcrumbs in the pan.

Get them brown. Cook on both sides. Takes about like 10 minutes or so.

Maybe 15, maybe 20. I don't know. Feel out the texture. After it's all absorbed and coated with the oil and butter and brown and kind of a little crunchy, then take it out.

Put some herbs to Provence, some garlic salt or garlic powder, some salt.

Toss it around and then throw it in the oven at like 400, 450 to just dry it out a little bit.

Maybe another 10 minutes. And voila, you're done.

Great croutons. Oh, I missed the sausage. And your bread doesn't have to start off being dedicated to croutons.

If you've got a loaf of Italian that's getting old, use that.

No comparison between store-bought and homemade croutons, by the way.

Right. Yeah, it's hard to beat like homemade stuff, right?

Like this Caesar is going to be awesome.

And here we have the sausages. Here I have the pasta. I'm going to throw those sausages in there.

And now with my salad, I can dress it with my Caesar. So here's the Caesar again.

I might add a little bit more olive oil, actually. Because I want a little bit more body in this.

So a little bit more olive oil. All right.

Now you can do one of two things with your Caesar. You can either turn the heat off of everything.

I think we're good. With your Caesar, you can either put your salad directly into the bowl that you use for mixing.

Or you can go ahead and self-dress it and put it in here.

But what I prefer to do with the croutons is add them after you dress the salad.

Oh, yeah. Otherwise, they get soggy.

And it's not what you want. Right. So I'm going to start plating the food here.

But first, I'm going to toss the salad here. So I'm going to take my pan here, stir this around.

We're doing good on time, buddy.

Look at that. Yep. All right. Let's get some dressing in there.

We'll add some. I'm going to use my Rusty works here. I'm going to toss it.

I feel like I didn't mash my garlic enough. So we're going to have a little bit of some of that's going to happen.

I think I'm going to end up using all of my dressing.

I like dressing the croutons.

I put it all in. My garlic, I guess I'm going to chop it a little finer at the start.

You know, this is easily scalable. You just double the ingredients with the same amount of work, and you can make it for more people.

Yeah, there's that beauty about these dishes.

It's just not that much more work. You add more.

You got a big party, more lettuce, more everything. But same steps. This is working out pretty good.

I'm pretty impressed with us. So I'm going to start plating the pasta, and then I'll plate a salad.

You can look at it. Oh, yeah.

So Kirby, why must you be in the way? Wow, look at this.

I didn't do bad. I just added up. All right.

Now I'm going to plate the salad.

I could even serve it separately.

I might do that. Yeah, I'm live.

I'm live. Salad. Let's go. Take the croutons. Where did I put the croutons?

That is the question. Oh, man. I bought them. I took them away.

So look at this. This is great. Should I put them in the fridge?

There's my wine. You ever try this boxed wine? It's actually, this stuff's pretty good.

It is 625.

We have four minutes so we can have a bite of this stuff. Yeah. Okay.

Wow, man, we did it in an hour. This is great. Yeah, it's okay. Oh, you almost forgot.

Very important. Yep. Two really important ingredients on your salad that you gotta finish with.

You should toss it with some fresh grated parm.

This should have been in the big dish, right? And of course, there is no replacement for fresh ground pepper.

Just gotta do it. All right, Watson, we got like two minutes here.

Two minutes to sit and enjoy the fruits of our labors.

Oh, yeah. Hey, buddy. Cheers. Cheers.

Hey, let me see your face so I can show you properly. Yep. There you go, buddy.

All right.

I'm gonna try. What are you gonna try first? I'm gonna try the salad. Salad.

Okay, I'll try the salad here. See how we did. It's pretty good.

How's the pasta? My son approves of the pasta. Good? All right. Thank you, babe.

And okay, now I'm gonna try the pasta.

I lost a minute here. Good.

Good stuff.

Well, Watson, this is really fun. I can't wait to see you back in San Francisco.

I'm looking forward to seeing you back in San Francisco when that happens.

Oh, yeah. How long are you going to be in Madrid for until you come back? Not clear.

Probably till end of August. My choice is staying in a small apartment with no dog or staying in a larger house with dog.

Right, right. Oh, that's right. Yeah, you got a lot of space there now.

And I'm switching back to my hazy IPA. Yeah, I'm drinking a Miller High Life.

Yeah.

Well, we did it in an hour. I feel like there was pressure, but it was action -packed.

I hope you all enjoyed the show. Thank you so much for tuning in. Next week, Thursday at 5 p.m.

East Coast, I'll be cooking again with Carol Lavati and Molly Evans in our Austin office.

And we're going to do some Anthony Bernain. I don't know what yet.

Let's tune in. Until then, bon appetit. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on.

I can't wait to see you. Bye.