I got only this far

I tested out some of the keto pasta and baked a loaf of keto bread, but while I made two small pasta dishes for myself, I didn't make a croque madame. It would've been too much food. So I'm freezing the keto loaf and doing croque madames after my hospital appointment this coming Wednesday the 9th. Today's photo essay is less about the sauce and meatballs and more about how the pasta turned out. I learned a few valuable things, that's for sure.

But let's get the sauce and meatballs out of the way first. I used shrimp and store-ground pork as my proteins, and that in itself was a mistake because I got a gristly batch of pork. Normally my store's ground pork is of decent quality, with no weird, cartilaginous bits in it, but with almost every single meatball I ate today, I was spitting out tiny chunks of gristle. Nasty. Despite being in Asia for decades, I still haven't learned to appreciate the crunchy glory of gristle, tendons, knuckles, and other bits of collagen-rich connective tissue. My brother Sean is the one in the family most likely to love these things; he's the most culinarily Korean brother. David and I, meanwhile, are fairly "white" in our dietary preferences. The shrimp was frozen, with the tails already removed (i.e., the bag of shrimp wasn't cheap); I gave those a quick thaw and a very rough chop. Now, if you've ever made stuffing for mandu (dumplings, potstickers) using pork and shrimp, you know that you're normally supposed to either mince your protein finely or blitz it in a food processor until it's practically a paste. I was in a hurry, so I didn't do that, and the result was rough (and probably why I became aware of the gristle, come to think of it). I combined the rough-chopped shrimp and the ground pork, added Italian herbs and seasonings (no fennel, though), scooped out meatballs with my ice-cream scoop, and fried everything up. The tomato sauce, meanwhile, was store-bought; I'm capable of my making my own sauce, but as I said, I was in a hurry.

Meanwhile, I threw together Victoria's keto bread, which is fairly eggy and could probably benefit from a major dose of vital wheat gluten and fewer eggs (which also means proofing). The bread, as it cools down, tends to collapse like a soufflé. See below. I plan to freeze this:

a shrunken loaf of keto bread; hard to believe this is a yeast bread

As I think I mentioned in another post, vital wheat gluten is often added to keto breads to give them the gluten structure they need to rise. Victoria's keto flour has a base of almond flour and oat fiber—and neither flour contains gluten, so the yeast's natural effervescence has little to latch onto but gluten-free flours and, maybe in some occult way (I could be talking out of my ass), the egg whites that are also a part of the bread recipe.

very chunky pork/shrimp/gristle meatballs coming together

some pan-fried meatballs, dumped on a plate

frying in progress

I finished the pan-fried meatballs in the sauce for a good 20 minutes on low heat to make sure the meatballs' interiors were totally cooked.

Looks like not much of anything.

Below: a single serving of cavatappi being boiled. The word means something like "corkscrew," and to my mind, it's reminiscent of the English word cavitation, which is when gaseous bubbles can form around helically spinning propeller blades that, when pushing a boat or submarine forward in the water, form a corkscrew pattern through space and time. Whether the etymologies match up is something I'll have to check later. Corkscrews aboil:

edamame pasta—very thin and breakable

after 6-8 minutes of boiling, per the package recommendations

The package recommended boiling the lupini pasta (i.e., the cavatappi) for 6-8 minutes. I scooped the little guys out of the water after 8 minutes, and I could tell they still weren't done, but I did notice that some of the bitterness had boiled out of the noodles. I left the noodles in for another 7 or so minutes, and that seemed to do the trick. Never trust the box instructions.

These edamame noodles took only 3-4 minutes, by contrast

The smell of the dry edamame spaghetti, when it came out of the package, was not encouraging. But I held my nose and prepped a serving, anyway. You see it boiling above; below, the noodles have been drained and placed in a bowl:

These noodles, too, seem to have lost some of their veggie flavor during the cook.

I made one modest serving of each style of pasta, scooped some meatball sauce onto each, shaved some Parmiggiano reggiano onto each serving, and chowed down.

the edamame-spaghetti serving

cavatappi after two boils

sauced-up cavatappi

Lessons learned:

• Cook your lupini pasta (at least this brand) at a full boil for at least 12 minutes.
• The edamame pasta turned out to be better than I'd thought it would be. I kept expecting some sort of weird aftertaste to build up in my mouth while I ate, but there was nothing aside from a faint "vegginess" about the pasta. I'll be using this again.
• I think the lupini pasta will be great for dishes like baked ziti and mac & cheese as long as I cook the hell out of the pasta (i.e. overcook it by Italian standards) first.
• Both pastas get a passing grade. Just don't smell the raw edamame pasta, and don't sample a dried lupini noodle. That way lies sadness.
• These pastas aren't cheap, but I have to wonder if they're a better option than making my own keto pasta. I want to try making keto orzo so I can have a keto risotto. The Kaizen lupini orzo (or "keto rice") remains out of stock on iHerb, and I didn't see it at all on Amazon. What I did see, in both places, was a konjac (pronounced like cognac) "rice," which, after rinsing, is basically tasteless. If I were to use konjac, it'd be solely for the texture. I'd much rather try to make risotto with either a lupini pasta or a variation of my own keto-Spätzle recipe.
• Lupini cavatappi have to be moved around in the boiling water; otherwise, you get these little, suntanned bits on top (look closely at the cavatappi photos again) that weren't in direct contact with the water.

I guess these pastas are all worth the effort. I just need to make a better sauce next time. The gristle in the ground pork was, frankly, a surprise: I've used that ground pork routinely to make homemade breakfast sausage and Italian-style sausage. From now on, I'll do as I do with ground beef: I'll make my own ground pork, and to do that, I'll buy a combination of pork tenderloin and pork belly (삼겹살/samgyeopsal—"3-layer meat"). That way, I can control whether there's any gristle in my ground meat. Pork tenderloin is nothing but muscle and almost no fat, which is why I need to add the pork belly: to up the fat content.

As for the croque madame, that'll be happening at some point after the 9th. Meanwhile, I'll be fasting Monday, Tuesday, and probably part of Wednesday. I'll be curious to see whether Samsung Hospital requires me to go in and give a blood sample for this appointment (I'll get a text notification on Monday or Tuesday), seeing as it's coming only two months after my previous appointment. Your HbA1c score is a three-month average. I'm down to around 6.8, I think, which is a lot better than the 7.3 that I saw in May. Ideally, I need to get down to 5.5. That's the mission for the rest of the summer. Right now, the goal is just to live day by day and to try to survive the year. Fingers and tentacles crossed.