cook: vietnamese american garlic butter noodles

I cooked this dish last night from photos of a J. Kenji Lopez Alt recipe I saved on my phone.                    

 

The smashing of the garlic cloves (a whole head and almost a half)in my mortar and pestle was fun, which I then transferred to another little bowl. I then poured approximations of the oyster sauce, fish sauce and tamari (instead of the soy I didn't have) into my mortar. I didn't want to cook my pasta in a large frying pan per the recipe and instead boiled as usual in my stockpot and sautéed the garlic in butter in my large nonstick skillet.

 

I had not quite a pound of Barilla spaghetti and used up the rest of that instead of opening the new package of Italian spaghetti I bought at Trader Joe's. I tasted my garlic butter sauce and thought it a bit too salty but hoped the pasta would offset the saltiness.

I also wished that I'd used the whole bunch of scallions, but was too lazy to continue chopping the scallions on the bias. Also I don't yet have the technique of emulsifying the cheese into the sauce. I needed to use a ladle instead of a wooden spoon for adding more pasta water into the pasta. I can see the cheese clinging to my utensils rather than to the noodles. I think I added the cheese atop the noodles rather than first to the sauce, and that was my huge misstep. 

Oh well. I topped the pasta with crab, and we ate the butter garlic noodles along with broiled zucchini. Patrick thanked me for dinner. 

I gave the rest of the pasta to Cecilia, who declared it delicious. All's well, end's well. I aim to make this dish again but better.