Farfalle pasta in a Saffron infused creamy pizza sauce

Can you imagine losing all your data from blogger? For food bloggers, the loss of content "I feel" means a lot of re-work. Cooking, presenting well, taking pics, writing down the recipe, posting the pics and recipe online....
That is heck of a lot of work to repeat, what would happen if you lost all of it? Hard to imagine right?

I was reading through a small article by Vanessa and I thought it was important to share the information.
If you already know it, or have implemented it, good for you! smart you!, please share such information that you already know of, so that people like me (who wouldn't have even given it a thought) can be aware of.

So, the issue here is "we don't back up" the content we so painstakingly write in our blogs. Well, at least I don't!
And if something were to happen to blogger (I am only talking about "blogspot" here) as Vanessa points out is inevitable some day. Issues like getting locked out or being banned from your own account are horrible things to hear, but what happens to all your blog posts? We normally don't subscribe to our own posts, so where is the backup?
What she suggests in her article is "create an email ID and send your posts to it" as you publish.
For this: Goto Dashboard --> Settings --> Email --> "BlogSend Address"
Enter your "non-google" email ID and have your posts sent to it.
I would in addition suggest, have a copy of pictures in your local hard drive.
Please back up data! And share information. Good luck.


Useful updates from Readers:
I am leaving them here, since not everyone feels the need to comment, and might end up missing out on all this wonderful knowledge.

Nick: "I actually upload my photos to photobucket.com and link to them from there as well as store all of them on my computer. The other thing you should do (if you made any changes) is to copy the HTML Layout code into Wordpad (or TextEdit for Mac's) and save it to your computer as well."

Ivy - "About blogger, there is an easy way to backup your blog. http://www.codeplex.com/bloggerbackup
However, I have moved to wordpress and have not yet found out how I backup my wordpress posts. If someone knows I would appreciate the help."

Mike of Mike's Table - "As for the backups, definitely a not glamorous thing but everyone absolutely should do it. I almost lost it all once but lucked out. I use Wordpress and there are a handful of plugins out there which do backups of everything (database + your photos) automatically and can even be scheduled to email the backups to you periodically. I believe there are also some which integrate with Amazon's storage service (S3), but that isn't free (although it sure is cheap)."


Now, let us back up some pasta in our tummy, shall we?
I am no Giada of pastas but I do cook decent tasting pasta meals :)
So, here are some things that might help while cooking pasta:
Good quality sauce makes the world of difference.
Do not keep stirring the pasta while it is boiling in the water, a couple of times would suffice.
Salt the water well before cooking the pasta in the pot.
Add oil (and salt) after draining the water to prevent the pasta from sticking to each other.
Cook pasta to al-dente (fancy word for not fully cooked/firm, should still have a bite to it like Giada says), or it tends to turn sticky/mushy (especially the whole-wheat ones.)

I bought Durum wheat pasta, I had it delivered (so I did not buy it after seeing it) and was under the impression it was whole-wheat, as that is what it said in the package, but apparently semolina is refined flour, so there is a unexpected indulgence. Healthier option would be whole-wheat farfalle undoubtedly.
Did you know Farfalle is derived from the Italian word "farfalla" which means butterfly. That explains the shape, doesn't it?

As for the sauce, I have used a jar of pizza sauce that I had at hand. If you choose to go my way, please use a good quality one, that is key.
Saffron gives the sauce such a rich flavor and aroma, you have to taste it to believe it. I was pretty happy with the outcome. If I have interested you enough, read on for the recipe.

Farfalle pasta in a Saffron infused creamy pizza sauce

Ingredients:

Organic Durum wheat pasta - 1 box
Pizza Sauce - 1 bottle
Heavy cream - 1/4 cup
Saffron - 1/4 tsp
Green onions - 1/4 cup chopped
Mixed vegetables of your choice - A few cups, cut in the same size
Olive oil - 3 tbsp
Black pepper - 2 tsp
Salt - To taste

Method:

Cook the pasta according to package instructions, add a wee bit of salt and olive oil after draining the water and set aside.

Cook vegetables of your choice in a little olive oil, add salt, pepper and set aside.

For the sauce, bring the pizza sauce to a medium heat, add more pepper if needed.
Crush the saffron between your hands and mix it to the heavy cream.
Add the heavy cream to the hot pizza sauce and stir for a minute. Turn off heat. You may add herbs if you want, but I wanted to keep the saffron flavor prominent, hence I did not.

To serve, spoon the sauce at the bottom of the plate, layer with cooked pasta, then the vegetables. Add chopped green onions.
Sprinkle a little crushed dry saffron on top.
The heat from the sauce and pasta elevates the aroma of saffron. Heaven!

The bread served along with this pasta is Roasted Garlic Challah Bread



This is off to Aartee's Sapadu Ready event