Another easy pasta dish

Shrimp with spaghetti in a sauce made from butter/olive oil, lots of garlic, white wine and a bit of chicken stock and parsley, topped with asiago cheese.

I wanted to show you this dish as another variation of the simple pan technique I mentioned here last week.

I had a few emails after I posted that entry asking what the exact amounts of wine and stock were. I can't tell you that, not because it's some big secret but because this is more of a technique than a recipe.

The type of wine and the stock you have on hand are going to vary, depending on what's around. If you have a sweet wine like a Reisling, for example, you might want to not use as much as you would if you had a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

On the other hand, if you have some really good homemade stock you might want to really feature that, conversely if all you have is some canned stock that doesn't have much flavor you might need to use twice as much and then reduce it until it has some taste. Be careful when you do this though, it may become quite salty, you might not need much salt later.

TASTE AS YOU GO!!!! TASTE, TASTE, TASTE!!!!

Didn't mean to shout but I hope you get my point. Using what's on hand is much more interesting to me because I'm not eating the same old thing all the time, plus I'm taking advantage of the best ingredients available and featuring them prominently. Learning to cook this way, really cooking instead of blindly following a recipe will give you better meals and a lot more fun in the kitchen in the long run.