Cooking crispy cheese

As you know I am a vegetarian baboon and so are all of my troop at Baboon HQ!  I like to share vegetarian recipes with pals who are vegetarian or like vegetarian food, so here is one of our favourites.  Its official name is pasta pagmigiana, but we change a few ingredients and called it crispy cheese.

Ingredients

Amounts suitable for 2 adults with good appetites!

8 oz of pasta

2 peppers, colourful ones are nice



A few mushrooms
1 leek (we added that)
1/4 pint of yogurt (the original recipe was for double cream but that was a bit rich for us baboons)
Some lemon juice
Black pepper (plenty of it for us baboons
Cheese (a hard cheese with enough fat in it to sizzle and get brown and crispy, as much as you want)
A little olive oil (or other oil if you prefer)
Boiling water for pasta

Prepare your ingredients

Chop the vegetables as small as you prefer.
Grate the cheese
Measure out 1/4 pint of yogurt (that is about the size of a small pot)

Start cooking

If your grill is electric and takes time to warm up turn it on to a medium heat about now.

Fry the vegetables in a little olive oil (or other oil) for about 7 minutes in a high heat.
Boil the pasta for as long as you normally do.

When the vegetables have been fried I tend to drain them to get rid of excess fluid from the mushrooms as it makes the sauce slightly creamier and less likely to split.

What do I do next?

Take the vegetables (drained or otherwise depending on what you prefer), off the heat and stir in the yogurt, sprinkle in a few drops of lemon juice (how much depends on your taste), and liberally add freshly ground black pepper (if you can get it, if not any pepper).

By this time you should be ready to drain the pasta.

Now what?

Mix up the cooked pasta with the vegetable sauce in an oven proof dish.

Sprinkle the grated cheese on top.
If your grill is gas turn it on now to a medium heat.  If your grill is electric I hope its on medium heat by now.

Put the dish under the grill 6 to 8 inches below the heat source if possible.

OK what next?

You will have quite a lot of washing up by now so at Baboon HQ we normally do that while the dish is under the grill.

You will know how good your grill is and how long it will take.  We have an electric grill and I leave it there for about 15 minutes, about half way through that I turn it up to a higher temperature to really crisp up the dish.  Whether you that will depend on your grill and how crispy and charcoalish you like your food.

Do we twiddle our thumbs while its grilling?

We baboons do have thumbs to twiddle but we don't do that.  We are always busy at Baboon HQ these days so multi-tasking is the word.  While the dish is grilling I do other things.  Today I rinsed some nice berries to eat later.

Eventually the dish is ready so you can take it out from under the grill.  I usually find the dish is so hot that I double up on oven gloves to avoid dropping it.

Look how yummy that looks!  Enjoy!

My person likes to have white wine with this, the man person likes red wine and we other baboons have banana cocktails (non-alcoholic of course, the idea of drunken baboons is a little scary)!