Seafood pasta

I discovered another perk to working in the restaurant on Sundays (in addition to the free leftover food, which I'll write about in a minute).

I usually work doubles on Sundays, brunch plus dinner. For brunch, they bring in a selection of newspapers for people to peruse, including the New York Times and the Boston Globe. They throw away the inserts, so I helped myself to the coupons and the sales flyers.

Between the coupons and some judicious shopping at CVS, making full use of the ExtraBucks program, I scored $120 worth of stuff for $45. So you can bet I'll be snagging the coupons from now on.

(Disclaimer: I don't usually shop with coupons, because generally coupons are for over-processed name-brand crap food; the kind of stuff I don't buy. But, if you can combine a coupon with a store sale, and/or some other sort of store promotion, like Double Coupon Day or CVS' ExtraBucks, you can walk away with some amazing deals. So I'll start using coupons and watching sales for things I'll buy anyway, like shampoo and toothpaste. Don't worry, I still won't buy frozen pizza or Lucky Charms, even if I can get it for free.)

The other good part of working Sundays, as I've mentioned, is that they throw away all the unused food on Sunday nights, and I'm welcome to help myself to any of it. This week was an especially good haul. I got three large pieces of Tasmanian sea trout, a container full of cooked mussels and whelks, a container of squid ink anchoiade, some scallions, some lemon juice, and some ramp puree.

So I whipped together a seafood pasta, using all of those things.

I cooked some penne and caramelized an onion. To the onion I added a little of the squid ink anchoiade and some of the pasta cooking water. To that I threw in the mussels and whelks, then the pasta. When everything was mixed together, I added the Tasmanian sea trout, cut into large pieces. Then I turned the heat off, added chopped parsley and scallions, and waited until the sea trout was just warmed through.

Then I ate it. It was awesome. Free food never tasted so good.