Using garlic again - glorious anchovy spaghetti

Tonight, I made anchovy spaghetti - salty, savoury, incredibly pungent and fishy (but in a totally delicious way).

The long and short of it is, you take pasta (the long ones go best, not the short type) and you have anchovies and make it chock full of minced garlic. I had it for the first time at Big D's Grill when he was in the Bedok coffee shop in Singapore and loved it to bits, and then suffered terribly for the enduring garlic after taste. Nonetheless, recently I begain craving for it, and decided to try making it tonight.

Found a super simple recipe from allrecipes.com, and modified it from what I remember from the Big D version and the feedback from the readers on the site.

One seemingly obvious lesson I took away from the classes at CIA is that you have to taste, taste, taste your food during the cooking process - I used to have the rather odd habit of barely tasting my food as I cooked and hoped for the best at the end. Crazy, I know. These days, I follow the recipe proportions to some extend but rely on my tastebuds and personal preferences to add and subtract appropriately.

First, I added a generous handful of chopped and crushed chili padi, and instead of minced garlic, I used 4-5 largeish cloves which I smashed with a knife (if they were oversmashed I'd discard them and start with a fresh clove - don't want to risk toooo much bits of garlic scattered everywhere). Instead of water, I used chicken stock. Also added some tinned diced tomatos (sans water) that I had leftover from the chicken jambalaya the other night.

When the garlic and chili padi came together with a dash of olive oil in a delicious and nose tickling aroma, it made me cough uncontrollably, but that soon passed. Then, threw in anchovies including some of the oil it came in, and chopped parsley. I wasn't sure how salty the anchovies will end up (during the cooking process, the anchovies get broken up into quite tiny minced pieces), so I added them gradually as I went along. Finally, the tomatoes, and the chicken stock, and simmered for around ten minutes. When it tasted a tad too salty and didn't have enough of the chili kick, I added more chili and a little water, as well as a lot more fresh parsley than the original recipe called for.

Then, after a bit more simmering, I ensured I removed the garlic pieces (which had softened considerably) as I felt it had given up enough of the garlic flavour and then added the cooked spaghetti and tossed it over medium heat to ensure it's evenly distributed before serving immediately.

I loved it!!!!! and would cook it again in a heartbeat!! Enjoyed it lot more than the Big D version because it only had a touch of garlic and I guess, because I couldn't believe I made something so delicious with my own hands - possibly a biased opinion of course.  J said it was delicious but grumbled that there wasn't any meat - apparently anchovies is not counted as... perhaps the next time round I will toss in some boiled shrimp or serve it together with a separately done piece of chicken or steak.

And I still have some of the anchovy left - considering cooking this again in the next couple of days while J is travelling, and I may try it without garlic this time just to experiment with the outcome.