How to lose weight

Steps to losing weight.

1. Discover veteran french chef and former cooking partner of Julia Child, Jacques Pepin
2. Obsessively watch every cooking show he ever made on YouTube
3. Go to kitchen and prepare dinner while addressing a fake television audience
4. Speak in a french accent
5. With your hours of YouTube coverage, feel a certain bravado and do that one handed flipping thing with your frying pan
6. Clean half of your planned dinner off the floor
7. Face the hard glare's of your family as you sheepishly apologize for the tiny portion sizes

Voila, smaller portions, less calories, guaranteed weight loss.

Or cook the above pasta dish inspired by Monsieur Pepin's love of butter and salt and say to hell with weight loss. I made this dish up as we had no food in the house except a bit of pasta, one zucchini in the bottom of the fridge, an onion, some garlic and the last bit before the rind of some parmasan cheese. Oh yes and two hungry boy's wanting to know what was for lunch as it was now 3pm. Time flies when with M. Pepin!

I didn't really make a note of what I was doing as this wasn't something I thought I was going to share, but it was so good and quick, I just had to tell you about it.

Basically I put about 1-2 tbsp of olive oil in my pan and gently sauted the onion, garlic and zucchini. When it looked like it might brown I added about 1/4 cup of vegetable stock and covered the pan. After a few minutes when the vegetables were soft I added cracked black pepper. Removing the lid I let the liquid cook down until almost all gone, to develop the flavours.
Meanwhile I had put the pasta on to cook. When it was done I added about 1/2 cup of the well salted pasta water to the vegetables then poured in the well drained pasta.
Next came a good tbsp of butter and about 1/4 cup of grated parmasan.
Serve immediately with extra parmasan and cracked black pepper.

Simple, non? Let's face it, slip a knob of butter into anything and it's going to be good; (now all I can think about are all the things that a knob of butter wouldn't work with, like a cup of coffee, but you know what I mean).

As Jacques Pepin would say....'appy cooking!