Bucatini

Bucatini makes me happy. I don’t know what it is about this pasta shape, it makes me feel like a kid, feel like slurping, it requires eating alone. It’s messy, because it never gets really limp. You can’t wind it around your fork. One single piece fills your mouth. It demands fun stuff on top, none of your serious gourmet sauces need apply!

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It looks like fat spaghetti, but there is a hole inside, una buca, and there’s how they got the name.

If you don’t know where to find it near you, the site where that picture comes from can sell it to you online.

Anyway, that hole means that bucatini is great for juicy things that can run inside. Therefore, since you can’t roll it around your fork, and have to slurp it a bit, and that hole is filled with something liquid, it’s pretty much a scene from Tom Jones, the movie, when I eat it. I snap the long strands into thirds and that helps a bit.

Tonight I ate them with tomato sauce just like that I used for the Pane Frattau.

Simple Tomato Sauce

1/2 cup finely minced onion, celery and carrot
2 cloves of garlic cut up
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
1 28 ounce can of peeled Roma tomatoes, or others you like
salt to taste
You may add oregano or basil or any herb you like, but you don’t have to every time.

Sauté the vegetables and garlic in the oil until they soften, then add the tomatoes, stirring them in. Using a stick blender, puree the sauce and then heat it, tasting to correct salt, for ten to 15 minutes. Once cooled it can be kept covered in the fridge for many days or frozen in portions for almost forever.

Chinese Meatballs

I also made some Chinese meatballs like I’ve made before for a very different recipe. These meatballs consist of the meat from inside sausages and about an equal amount of lean ground pork, a few minced scallion tops, some grated ginger, some wine vinegar, a bit of toasted sesame oil, and sometimes some crushed red chili bits. I think cheese would not go with these meatballs at all.

I liked it. I liked it very much indeed. I smiled through the wreath or tomato sauce around my mouth and felt not a year older than twelve. You have to love a food that can do that for you. It’s especially nice to be a twelve year old who can also drink I nice glass of Rifosco with her bucatini. As a matter of fact, with what I have been hearing about the foul weather in North America, I think I have to export this feeling to Presto Pasta Night. They could use a big red grin over there.