Last-Minute Spaghetti al Limone

Hi, I'm Josh Ozersky, and you're watching eHow.com. Being lazy and not especially thoughtful or being good at planning things ahead of time, I've got to make something for my wife. So I'm going to make her spaghetti a-la-limone. All I basically need to do it is some spaghetti, a lemon, oil, whatever. And I've always got that in the house. So I'm going to get the salty water here. Very little water. It should be as salty as sea water generally. I put like a, I just do it by eye. Now while that's going I'm going to put some olive oil in a pan here. I'm going to break open a couple of garlics. Nothing easier or more pleasurably violent that peeling garlic. Take that! Alright so this is going to go in there. I guess the reason you cut it up is because the garlic has what are called volatile oils inside it. That is the thing that makes it taste like garlic. In the same way that the fat in meat is what makes it taste like meat. And as soon as I see this start to boil like this, I give it like one second and then maybe I'll be done with it because the last thing I want is for this to brown and burn. So this is beginning to turn brown. It's beginning to toast. If it's happening too much, it's a little trick I learned from Michael White, if it's happening too much you can take a little bit of water and add it in. And that stops it cooking. Alright, so that's good. I want to get some extra lemon flavor into it. I want to get not only the squeezy lemon but I want to get the zest as well. So I'm going to zest some lemon into this, like so. This is the microplane grater. it's a cool thing to own. It costs nothing. It's fun to use and it's good for putting cheese over spaghetti. That by itself makes it worthwhile. It makes stuff that's so fine that it sort of dissolves. If a garlic was bigger I would do the garlic with it. The lemon, the lemon skin, or zest as they call it, has got a little bit different flavor. And I'm kind of a believer in having like different levels of flavor you know? So like you have one cut like when you make a sauce, there's one kind of garlic that goes in at the bottom of the pan to flavor the oil. Then pieces of garlic go in and cook with the sauce. And maybe at the end you add a little bit of raw garlic, whatever. So there's like all these different levels of flavor. Take this here like so. I'm going to poor off most of the water. Some of the water I'm going to reserve like so. Otherwise I'll be dealing with a hot pan and burn myself, whatever. Now most of it's gone. So now what I'm going to do, I'm going to take this spaghetti, I'm going to put it into this oil. Inevitably some water comes with it and that's a good thing because the water's what's going to hold it all together. I'm going to work this around good like so. Right now this would just be kind of greasy but I'm going to squeeze the lemon in. Try to keep that horrible seeds from falling. And I'm going to put this all together in the pan, in the pot rather. Because now I can control it. Now I have it in the pot. Works it, works it, works it, works it. You see it still looks a little bit shiny and greasy though. So I want to have a little more pasta water, just a tiny bit. To sort of act as that glue to emulsify it all together. Now don't forget we've got to have some pepper, we've got to have some peperoncino. And most importantly plenty of salt. Then I'm going to grate the cheese. The cheese is key, not only for the flavor but because the cheese is going to be another element to bind it all together. Alright, I've got my pepper, my peperoncino, my cheese, my salt. It's all holding together perfectly. My God this is so nice. You know, if you think of it you could have a little bit of parsley I guess on top of this or whatever. But it like so totally doesn't need it. Oh my God. The truth is I'm doing, I'm doing my wife a favor by even sharing this with her. Much less cooking it. So a little pepper on top. A little more cheese, just to make it look nice. And then you put the lemon along side it. And there is your spaghetti a-la-limone. I'm Josh Ozersky, thank you for watching and check me out again on eHow.com