Veggie dashi pasta

It was one of those days that there isn't any prepared food in the house that actually constitutes LUNCH, and there weren't any pre-drawn plans for lunch, either. So what I do is I usually settle for biscuits and high-calorie chips, or like I did just now - go through the vegetable bin and dry pantry and cook something up!





What I had on hand:

• pasta (spaghetti, to be exact, and who doesn't have pasta at home?)
• dashi granules
• potatoes
• tomatoes
• a red onion
• tons of garlic
• the seasonings are pretty much gonna be described later

And here's pretty much what I did, in no particular order, because I suck at multitasking in the kitchen.

1. Roughly chopped two tomatoes and one potato into cubes; sliced up the red onion and about 7-8 cloves of garlic.
2. Boiled pasta according to package instructions, drained them and coated them with olive oil.
3. Stir-fried potatoes and onions in a large non-stick pan on high heat for about 2 minutes.
4. Added 1 1/2 cup dashi stock (1 1/2 cup water + 1 tsp dashi granules) mixed with 1 tbsp shoyu and a small splash of Chinese cooking wine, covered, and allowed veggies to simmer.
5. Removed potatoes from pan, along with the reduced sauce, and stir-fried garlic and tomatoes until the skins of tomatoes started to come off.
6. Re-added the potatoes, and tossed in the pasta.
7. Served pasta, and topped with a little chili powder and dried chives.

Note that I didn't add salt? Yeah. That was prolly the only downside, but I personally find that the dashi and vegetables themselves gave enough flavor without needed too much salt (of course, some salt from the shoyu.

Overall, it didn't taste BAD, but just a little bland, and a little oily.