Easy Parmesan Sauce of Pasta or Chicken

Hi, new to cooking, but this was very successful with the Italian S.O. last night (I am not italian.) I saw this recipe on gifrecipes, and i think it's worth knowing.

• 3 cups of water
• 1 tsp of salt
• rapid boil
• cook your favorite pasta right up till al dente, but NOT AL DENTE ( it should be slightly undesirably hard. Not like, no one could ever eat this, but more like, this is a little too hard, even for al dente.)

Okay, set the pasta aside. In a skillet or sauce pan:

• 1 cup of milk
• Bring to a simmer
• Add half a cup of parmesan (usually I eyeball it)
• 1 tsp of black pepper
• 1/2 tsp of garlic powder or use fresh garlic if you want
• 1/2 tsp of crushed red pepper (as far as these seasonings are concerned, I like to do 2 tsp of black pepper, 1 tsp of garlic powder, and 1/2 of red pepper, but this is your choice.)
• 1/2 to 1 tablespoon of all-purpose flour will make the sauce stick, so mix that in. This part I also eyeball and I veer on the less flour side. I also noticed that the sauce I made last night was a pooling up in my bowl, so maybe you can add more flour, it will be good.

when the sauce is mixed, throw the pasta in there, lower the heat, and stir for a while so the pasta cooks a bit more into al dente or more.

next, dried basil is best, fresh is not for this dish, and dried basil from the spice aisle is worst. I have packaged of basil, just sitting next to some peppers. Crush the dried basil in the final minutes of cooking and serve.

As you might have noticed, we only added the salt in the beginning to the water. I like my food to have a lot of salt and I believe that in a cooking video I saw once, if you season your food really well, and for some reason it just seems to be lacking, it's usually because a pinch of salt would be necessary.

The thing is though, I hate over salting food, especially when it's something I've never cooked, so only salt the water, and add salt to taste at the end, just over your pasta.

I'm not really great at cooking, but things like this are my redeeming qualifiers as someone who claims to be alright at it. This is probably nice with a lemon chicken on the side, or if you want to do it to stuff larger shells, I'm not sure.

Anyway, enjoy.

bon appetit