Posts filed under 'pasta'
I have this theory, and I am willing to be told I am wrong in this. My theory is that the familiar foods we call comfort foods can make us fat. Why would that be? Because we invest those foods with emotional content. We pull them out when life is hard, when the weather is terrible or when we feel bad for some reason. It’s often the first thing that comes to mind when we want to comfort a friend, too.
So, if it’s been a hard week and things haven’t gone our way, we make mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, stew, or whatever we find comforting and that reminds us of easier times. These are all things we know very well. Our tongue responds with impulses to the brain that open the doors to good memories and good feelings.
And then we overdo it. After three to five bites we’re relying on experience, and our taste buds take a rest, but we don’t stop.
Foods don’t really have emotional content. They have triggers to parts of us that have remembered emotional content. Whether the memory is good or bad, we connect to it. I once had a liverwurst sandwich hours before coming down with a bad flu, and I have never had another liverwurst anything since, although I used to love it.
Knowing that this is true for me, I don’t fix comfort foods of my past when I feel down. I, instead, try something outside of my experience and try to lose myself in learning new tastes, which for me is as distracting as mashed potatoes.
I do not believe that nothing says loving like something from the oven. Things from the oven are a delight. They are not love, but might inspire a memory of love, and not a thing more. If I am capable of thinking, I can inspire memories of love that don’t have anything to do with doughnuts, brownies or even holiday roast turkeys. If I am incapable of thinking, I take an orange or an apple and get over it.
I am 5’-1 ½” tall. As much as I cook, I could easily weigh 200 pounds if I let food and love get mixed up. Since I have the opportunity every four weeks of carrying 50-pound bags of salt, I know how I would feel if I gained even only 50 pounds. It wouldn’t be nice. Sometimes it even hurts my back for a day or two.
Divest yourself of habit and your mouth will deal with surprise. You’ll taste more. If food is an adventure rather than a happy-pill, you’ll know when you’ve had enough and won’t keep putting it in your mouth to keep the love going. Unless it is just an extraordinary thing you’ve happened on, in which case you may need a life coach to pull you off the plate. That would be me with the Sardegnan risotto with vinegared pork, which I ate yet one more time yesterday in Florence! You know what? My recipe is pretty good. I need to leave the pork in the vinegar longer, two days, I’m told, and make a more interesting tomato sauce as well.
That brings me to spaghetti sauce, which is a rather stupid term in Italian. There is no one sauce, as you know if you read this blog. I have recently found, however, that in the USA people do tend to think that there is something called spaghetti sauce and that their recipe is it. They also think you can buy it in a jar or a can. Well, you can buy various sauces in jars, cans and the refrigerated cases in Italy. The best I can say of any of them is: it’s alright. I never said that in the US, because they were too sweet.
There are thousands of ways to serve pasta wherever you are. Sometimes it’s even spaghetti. Most of the ways to serve pasta can also be used to sauce cooked grains or polenta, too. Just a glance at Presto Pasta Night ever Friday should convince you that this time I’m right.
Here is a modernized ragù that I like more often than the original recipe by Artusi, a meat sauce I find very rich and that for me lacks the brightness of modern foods. I like the spike of a little acidity from tomatoes, the slight smokiness and the reduced fat. I am still a dedicated Artusi fan, and I will still on occasion make his ragù, but this is my new fall back recipe, because it lends itself to other foods besides pasta, and yet is a wonderful thing with pasta, too. This is a spag bol, a polenta sauce, and today I ate it on boiled farro or spelt. That looked bad, but it was delicious. I used a tiny bit of Parmigiano Reggiano, but not much, because it was full-flavored on its own. This is a sauce to make up in quantity and freeze in portions that make sense for your home. It takes about 15 minutes to chop the vegetables, another 15 minutes to sauté them, perhaps ten minutes to cook the meat, and then, other than the occasional visit, it cooks itself.
A 21st century Ragù
1 cup of chopped onions
1 cup of chopped carrot
1 cup of chopped celery and leaves
2 cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of salt
1 small chili pepper (peperoncino) broken in half
1 tablespoon dried oregano or 3 tablespoons of fresh basil – if you use fresh, add it toward the end of cooking
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
100 grams (3.5 ounces) diced smoked pancetta or bacon (cook it first and then drain the fat if you use bacon, then pick the cooking up from the oil *and proceed)
2 pounds (1 kilo) of lean chopped meat – all beef or vitellone or part that and part pork
A glug of fortified wine like Sherry or Marsala
About 1 cup of milk—fat free is fine
Water
1 can (14 ounces, these days) of peeled canned tomatoes or a similar quantity of peeled fresh tomatoes
Salt to taste
Nutmeg to taste
Heat a large frying pan with the oil*. Sauté the chopped vegetables and the pancetta or cooked bacon with the salt very slowly until they are starting to brown a bit. Add the wine and cook until it dries out. Add the dried herb and the chili pepper, and then the chopped meat. Stir it up to mix while the meat loses its red color.
Add milk almost to the top of the mixture, lower the heat and walk away until you can hear it sizzling again. This took about 30 minutes for me. Then add hot water to cover and leave it alone again, checking back every 30-40 minutes to keep it wet until it has cooked about two hours and then allow the juices to evaporate away. The meat should then be very tender.
Add the tomatoes and break them up with a wooden spoon. Simmer that mixture ten minutes, then taste for salt and correct for it.
Allow it to cool in the pan, and then fill plastic freezer bags with the quantity you think you will use.
When you thaw and reheat it, grate nutmeg at the end until it suits you. Some like a lot, some none.
This recipe made 4 packages of something over a cup for my freezer.
There’s nothing tricky or out of bounds about this recipe. It’s a great thing to have in your fridge freezer, ready to pull out when tagliatelle, cooked grain or polenta is the right thing to eat. It will make a lasagna much richer than my taste, but certainly a tasty one.
Give it a try. You have nothing to lose but the handy extra jars from the Prego you thought you liked.
December 14th, 2007
Almost everybody here is sick. Most of them have a stomach virus and they can’t eat, but when it starts to go they have the hunger of a roaring lion, but no ability to digest what we usually eat. I was talking to Sognatrice from Bleeding Espresso the other day about what sick people can eat. We both agreed that big, pillowy Mennonite noodles that they call dumplings are one of the things to eat when you are recovering.
I remember fundraising suppers for Meals on Wheels in Hardy County, West Virginia, which were focused on those dumplings. The first time I attended, I was expecting big, fluffy biscuity dumplings, but that’s not at all what I found. One of the two suppers would be a velvet chicken soup loaded with puffy little squares, the other one was ham dumplings. I approached the crock-pot where they kept warm and saw, what? It looked like white sauce. But when it was stirred up for serving, revealed were scraps of country ham and the ubiquitous dumpling noodles. It was really, really good and we ate it with really, really good cole slaw. Hurrah for Meals on Wheels!
I decided to make them for Presto Pasta Night and dedicate the effort to all the sickos currently lying around Italy with sore tummies.
I have only made the noodles once in my life, when some of us were trapped by snow at my friend Jane’s house in Chevy Chase. It was soup weather, for sure, so we made chicken soup and homemade noodles. That must have been a decade ago, but a noodle like this is not easily forgot. In casting about the house, it was clear that no soup-worthy hen was hiding out. But there was a scrap of prosciutto crudo, so off we go.
First thing to say is that prosciutto crudo is not the right ham. You need a bit of either smoked country ham, or speck if you are in Italy. This really needs the smoke. Not having the smoke, I had to add this and that to make this good. I finally got something I would eat, but it’s a lot more and very different ingredients than the wonderful Mennonite cooks of my past would have used.
I started with the noodles. I piled 100 grams of flour on the counter top and made a well in it, dropped in an egg and a good pinch of salt and stirred it with a fork until it was dampened. Then I added a fat tablespoon of water, because these are American noodles. Using a dough scraper and two floury hands, I kneaded it a lot more than I do when I make Italian pasta. Once it was smooth, I formed a neat ball and left it on the counter to rest. Why the pasta gets to rest and cook doesn’t, I don’t know, but that’s the way it is.
I then used a rolling pin to roll it out on the floury counter. If you look at the photo below you’ll see it doesn’t resemble my Italian pasta at all. It’s floury, thicker and not stretchy. It’s almost 1/8” thick. I used a pizza wheel to cut it into the squares you see. They are a fat 1 inch. I left it to rest again.
To make the sauce, I decided that sick people need vitamins and vitamins live in vegetables. Voila! A sofritto.
My elaborated Mennonite cream/ham sauce
½ cup finely chopped celery
½ cup finely chopped carrot
¼ cup finely chopped onion
2 tablespoons butter
½ cup finely minced country style ham
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup or more milk
three splashes of Tabasco
a glug of fortified wine, such as sherry or marsala
salt to taste
generous nutmeg to taste
the juice of half a lemon
Begin by heating the butter in a heavy pan and sautéing the first three ingredients until really soft. Don’t brown them. Sick people don’t want crispy vegetables, so check the carrots, because they are the hardest one. Add the bits of ham, and stir in. Sprinkle the flour over the mixture, and cook a minute or so, stirring. Slowly add the milk, stirring it in. With all those lumpy vegetables, this will go smoother than with a plain white sauce. Bring to a simmer and cook over a very low heat for about 15 minutes, adding milk if it is too stiff. You want the liquid part to be a bit like heavy cream. Taste for salt and correct it. Your individual ham will add some, so it’s definitely a thing to taste and work at.
If it isn’t very tasty yet, add the Tabasco, wine, and then the lemon juice. I blame my porky but not smoky ham for these last two ingredients.
Bring a pot of water to a brisk boil, salt it and dump in the noodle squares. Boil them until they are fairly soft, not al dente like Italian pasta. It was hard for me to do this, but I persevered. I feared to end with flour soup, but managed to rescue them at a point where you could still chew a bit.
If your sauce thickens again, you can add a bit of the noodle water to loosen it.
Drain the pasta, then toss it with the sauce. Hmmm, pretty white! Put it on a colored plate, add a small vegetable and a bunch of white grapes (I always eat those when I am sick) and serve it steaming hot. It should feed three sort of sick people, four fairly sick people, and a crowd of really sick people. Those recovering can probably eat half each.
And now I hope everybody gets well and starts being able to eat like royalty again. Or go to Hardy County and eat the original which shmecks like crazy. Those are some very fine cooks.
December 6th, 2007
Two in one: Elizabeth, cook and entertainer of many, and Martin, everyone’s favorite local artist and all-around great fellow. How can you celebrate two such exceptional people? Melchiorre knows. You roast a suckling pig in the kitchen fireplace.
The place is Melchiorre’s family home in Umbria. The festive ones are expatriates from many countries, and the chef is said Melchiorre, Sardegnan by birth and Umbrian by rearing. The man has a way with meat.
The first course was raviolone, or big ravioli, stuffed with potato and cheese and sauced with piquant honey from his own bees and chili peppers. There’s no photo of the finished dish, because I decided to be the assistant and waitress.
This capable and generous woman always seems to be the helper, and it seems like it might be time for her to a bit more the guest and a bit less the worker bee.
But what is Melchiorre doing in the kitchen? Why he’s talking the piglet through rehearsal.
Where shall we eat this feast?
Maybe this table set for twenty six will do.
Who is Martin, again? Right over there in the corner among his friends.
After dinner, Brian played the accordion for us as we pretended to know the words to the songs. At the British sea chanties, we gave even the pretense up.
Then I drove home and 2 miles from my house had a flat tire. It was dark, there were 80 kilos of salt in the trunk on top of the tiny spare and I hadn’t so much as a match to light the job, so I took off down the road in my party heels and halfway there I was rescued and given a ride the rest of they way. Did you know your cellphone makes a decent warning signal to approaching cars? Now you do. And who gave me a ride?
The Samaritan was the chef of a local restaurant, and I call that serendipity.
November 12th, 2007
This is a recipe I developed for Slow Travel. It’s a pasta I really love, and thanks to a fine friend from North Carolina, I have the pecans to make it with. It’s rich and crunchy and deeply satisfying to eat on these cold and gray days. Pecans are difficult to find here in Italy other than in my freezer or a big city like Rome, Milan or Torino.
Definitely use a mild blue cheese for this pasta. Experiments during the trial and testing period showed that to be essential. The pasta does moderate the flavor of the blue cheese, but not enough if you use a strong one. It become ammoniac with strong cheese.
Pasta with Gorgonzola and Pecans
* About 280 grams (10 ounces) of penne
* A huge pot of water
* A small handful of salt
* 1 tablespoon/cucchiaio olive oil
* A small onion, chopped somewhat finely
* A couple of handfuls of coarsely chopped pecans
* 250 grams (8 ounces - a typical package) of Gorgonzola dolce or other mild blue cheese, broken or cut into smallish pieces
Start the pasta water to boil. When the water is boiling, add the salt and the pasta and stir.
In a heavy frying pan, heat the oil, and add the onion, cooking it slowly until it is softened. Add the pecans and stir about to toast and crisp them. Add the broken up cheese to the fried onions and pecans, stirring to melt. Ladle a small amount of the pasta cooking water into the pan to make the sauce creamier. At this point, the pasta should be about done. It should be quite firm. Drain the pasta and toss it into the frying pan, stirring to coat the pasta with the sauce. Taste for salt and correct if necessary. Some cheeses are saltier than others, so you can’t tell ahead whether you’ll need it or not. Serve immediately, smoking hot.
Warning: This is a fast sauce. If it is cooked too long or cooked and reheated it will become lumpy and unpleasant. Gorgonzola piccante is very unpleasant in this sauce.
A fruit salad is nice with this if this pasta dish is your main course. And now let’s send it off to Ruth at Presto Pasta Night. Don’t forget to click into her terrific roundups to see what people all over the world are doing with the nicest noodles.
November 9th, 2007
Today is a holiday all over Italy. Only entertainment venues are open so that holidayers can go out and eat or have their caffé. Schools are out until Monday, like Thanksgiving in the US.
Once upon a time, this was a religious holiday for visiting the graves of the ancestors, having masses said for them, spending time as a family to remember those who are no more. Now it’s a day off and everyone does as he likes.
The unique day off for the entire Italian world has made it easy for some Italians to take up Halloween and do it any way they like. Last night Tina had a potluck supper in her fun room that was once a garage. This year she’s added a wood cook stove, and that’s a happy thought indeed. We’ve had some chilly evenings out there in past years.
The dishes brought to the lengthy tables were varied and delicious. I wanted to know names for all of them. No one had a name for anything except one risotto for which Tina just made something up, “Riso al Duca.” For the rest, the makers told me to make up my own name. I think that’s an attitude that needs some tenderizer. After all, my American dish had a name.
I made Chili Mac. I used the homemade chili powder from the other day, and the flavor is wonderful, but the resultant chili is almost atomic, at least to an Umbrian. Some of my Umbrian friends like somewhat spicy foods, but this would have been a bit exaggerated even for them, and since I’d forgotten the shopping list in the car and therefore forgot to buy polenta, Tamale Pie wasn’t on, so I cooked some skinny, elongated elbows called gramigna, put them in the bottom of a big Dutch oven, then ladled chili over them and topped it all with grated American cheddar that my friend, Missjoe, had sent me this summer when her children visited. It bubbled and browned in the oven and perfumed my house in a way predicted to stimulate an American appetite. Lid clapped on, into the car, and onto the crackling wood fire of Tina’s stove.
They liked it! I saw a few people eat several helpings, so it wasn’t just kindness. Although they ate it like a primo, or first course, and called it a pasta, it was still impressive to me that so many Italians unbent to a foreign dish in which the flavors are absolutely unlike anything Italian. I can’t think of anything more American, can you? Although the particular chili peppers have Mexican roots, it isn’t Mexican. The cheese is certainly not much like British cheddar, it’s all-American. The combination looks, smells and tastes “molto particulare” or quite its own self.
I’ve always maintained that Italians would like cheddar if they were only allowed to try the real thing. It’s a bit the expatriate’s Holy Grail, with reports of finding some in this Auchan here, that Esselunga there — those are Italian supermarkets, well actually Auchan is French but we shan’t split hairs. I wish I had a photo to share, but really, who reading this has never seen a big pot of bubbling cheddar-topped something?
I first heard of Chili Mac when I was a young mum and wife living in Falls Church, Virginia. eg’s little friend gravely told me that his mother was the best cook in the entire world and that her best dish was Chili Mac. I’d never in all my New England rearing tasted a chili that was powerful enough to serve over anything, let alone spaghetti. It didn’t take long to find out what the lower part of the USA already knew — that chili was a deeply spiced meat stew with CHARACTER and not a mild creature from a can that looked like dog food until it was heated and served in a bowl. Chili never became an important part of my culinary repertoire, but something about autumn usually brought on a pot of chili. There’s hardly anything more cold weather appropriate in the American kitchen. Even the Thanksgiving roast turkey holds a single place in the autumn menu.
But chili can sit on a stovetop or in an oven and wait for you to come in cold and wet, and its perfume immediately promises the kind of comfort that warms the blood. Which wine? Are you joking? It’s beer for chili! Except last night the first offering of Franca’s new wine, or vino novello, was perfect. Right now the new wine still has a bit of sugar, not much alcohol and millions of the tiniest bubbles. It seemed a marriage made in Heaven.
I’m not sure that there has ever been an iconic recipe for chili. There’s more argument about chili than almost any dish I know. I bow to the vaster knowledge of the Southwesterners who have grown up knowing chili and eating chili and developing new chili recipes for chili contests. This recipe is just how I made it yesterday in a country far from Texas and New Mexico and a bunch of eaters who have never tasted any of the more expert chilis. As a practical cook, I used the meat that was on sale for €3.95 per kilo and it happened to be whole loin of pork. Ground beef was €7.95 per kilo and up. Argh! I figure no Mexican mamma ever spent that or failed to make chili if a cow hadn’t met her fate in the village. Chili is not rich folks food. I am not rich folk.
Meat: I cut the loin off a two kilo (4.4 pound) loin of pork. It was too lean, so I used lard to do the frying part to make up for that. I neglected to weigh the loin part before using it, sorry. There remain the bones with meat on them, which I will tackle later, and the tenderloin, which it will be my pleasure to use in other ways as well. I think I used about 3 pounds of pork, cut into a small dice.
3 onions, roughly chopped
1 large green pepper, diced
3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
6 tablespoons of homemade chili powder
salt to taste
lard for frying
4 tablespoons of corn meal
optional: 2 400 gram tins of beans, drained
Melt some lard to cover the bottom of a moderately sized stock pot. Throw in the onions and sauté them until they are transparent. Add the diced pepper and fry that, too, until softened. Add the garlic, and reduce the heat, stirring once in a while. Add the chili powder, stirring in, and fry that, too. Add about one liter of boiling water and leave to simmer.
In a separate heavy frying pan, melt a small amount of lard and fry the meat cubes a bit at a time, adding them to the big pot as they lose their pink color. When you are finishing the last batch, dip some of the cooking water out of the stock pot into the frying pan so that you don’t leave any of the meat flavors behind.
Now add enough boiling water to come to about an inch over the solids in the stock pot, and keep the stew at a simmer for several hours. After about 2 hours, check for salt and correct it. Add the beans if you want them. A half hour before it needs to be done, stir in the corn meal to thicken the juices. My chili cooked for four hours and I would have happily left it for several more, but I had to put the Chili Mac together in time to get it bubbly before carting it away. I was frankly stunned at how spicy it was! I knew when I was making the chili powder that it was a chancy venture. The recipe says “three of this one, three of that one” but the chillies were all different sizes. One would be 1.5 inches by 2 inches, another 2.5 inches by 4.5. Weighing would have been a big help, but I didn’t find any recipes with estimated weights.
For the Chili Mac, I cooked the pasta for a bit less than the six minutes recommended. I drained it, put it in the bottom of the big casserole, ladled some of the chili over it, maybe half, then covered it generously with grated cheddar cheese. I popped it uncovered into the oven which I’d preheated to 175°C or 350°F. It cooked for about thirty minutes, then lidded, was carted off to Tina’s.
This is no revelatory recipe, I know. It’s just what I and my friends ate one night in the autumn of 2007. If any of the chili that was left un-macked gets turned into Chili Mac again, I’ll throw a photo in here. Buon appetito!
N.B. I think I have finally gotten really good at loving my friends. I was so happy to see them, old and new, and for the few hours we were together, I wouldn’t have chosen another place to be for any prize. Maybe the best thing about aging is being in the moment, loving whoever is there, not feeling nervous about how you look, what you’re wearing or what useful thing you might be doing instead of being happy.
November 1st, 2007
or
To begin you do exactly the same things that we did in Carciofi 101.
When the artichoke slices are partly cooked, add the garlic slices to them. Once you get to the browned stage, however, add 6 small, sweet winter tomatoes cut into quarters and the pasta water as described, and as they cook, it will thicken up into a sweet and sour sauce. Cheese doesn’t go in this pasta, in my opinion.
So for two:
2 small or 1 globe artichoke, cleaned and sliced thinly
2 tablespoons of great olive oil — I used spicy oil from Puglia
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
salt to taste
6 sweet tomatoes on the branch (pomodori al grappolo)
from 100 to 200 grams (7 to 14 ounces) of pasta. The pasta shown is casarecce, which has a tube shape but looks homemade.
Flickr had stopped feeding the photos in Carciofi 101, so I had to load them into this program. It didn’t want them one bit! Since winter is artichoke season, let’’s send this to Ruth at Presto Pasta Night.
I had a small disaster making this. For the first time I oversalted the pasta water and had to start that all over again. Bleaugh!
October 31st, 2007
Here is a list of things to make starting now. They’re all from past indulgences eaten at my table. So, gobble these up while I finish the experiments I’m working on now.
Barzottini to start off with. A delicious appetizer/antipasto as crisp and savory as October days.
A pasta to love now that leeks are back in the markets? Try this Toasted Leek and Pecorino with Penne!
One of my favorites, the crunchy topped, cheesy goodness of this leek, bread and cheese casserole, as a replacement for pasta, a vegetable or a hearty meal in one.
Who has forgotten La Bomba? Not I. This is an ongoing love affair for me.
Where’s the meat? If you haven’t fixed this one yet, you’re missing one of the recipes I’m proudest of.
Room for dessert? Sin along with me with a bit of Hot Silk.
There, that ought to keep you busy for a day or two.
October 5th, 2007
Everybody in Italy is yelling at me, “Those aren’t orecchiette!” And they’re right, they aren’t. They are the same boiling water and flour pasta, but shaped a different way. They might be considered cauliflower ears (orecchiette is little ears) except the traditional recipe is not made with cauliflower, but with broccoli.
This, unlike almost all the recipes here, is not my recipe. You would not like the recipe I came up with for this pasta dish when I tried to recreate it on my own. It was never good, no matter how good the broccoli or how authentic the pasta, so in desperation I went to the website for Bari, Italy, where this dish comes from. The local radio station had posted an official recipe with an ingredient I would never have guessed if I’d tried for years. Without it this is just broccoli with some pasta. Meh. With it, it’s “Orecchiette con broccoletti”. The secret ingredient disappears completely, but creates the genuine flavor although it’s unidentifiable. The Baresi use what we in the US called broccoli rabe. I like it, but I love broccoli, so that’s what I make and it is grudgingly acceptable to the Baresi.
This is the first broccoli of the year. It is not the best broccoli of the year, because it hasn’t been cold yet and that’s what makes broccoli go from nice to slap-me-in-my-face wonderful. There’s a whole nutty thing that goes on in frostbitten broccoli. Still, not having seen a stalk of broccoli since May, I was pretty darned happy to see this nice big flower in the market Wednesday afternoon.
Here’s what goes into this pasta for two people:
200 grams of orecchiette or another similar pasta
8 ounces of fresh broccoli; stems, leaves and all, cut into smallish pieces
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
2 fat cloves of garlic, sliced
2 hot chilies, broken up with fingers – mine were the standard little hot ones found here, you might want to use one if yours are hot or if you feel wimpy
2 anchovy fillets
Put a big pot of water on to boil and then clean, cut and slice the various ingredients. Heat the oil in a large frying pan and put the broken chilies, the garlic slices and the anchovy fillets into it to gently fry. This happens to be one of only a few recipes in which you brown garlic, but you can’t burn it or it will all be ruined forever, like Scarlet O’Hara. So keep the heat low and just let the oil simmer.
Once the water is boiling, throw a lump (an all-fingers pinch) of coarse salt into it and then the pasta. Check the package for cooking time, because you need to know the estimated finish time. Stir it up and then let it boil. About three minutes before the cooking time elapses, add the broccoli into the pasta. Take a ladle full of the pasta water and spill it into the frying pan so the garlic won’t burn.
A minute before you expect the pasta to be done, start biting it to test it. You will want it to be a little less done than al dente. When it is, drain everything that is in the pot and put it into the frying pan, stirring it around and getting it well covered in the garlicky sauce. The pasta continues to cook during this, and this kind of pasta goes soft very fast, so it should go in a bit too firm. Once it’s mixed and wonderful, drizzle a little raw oil over it and serve it up. Delicious.
Even if you think you don’t like anchovies, do try this, because you can’t tell they’re in there. Promise. I buy them in little jars that I keep in the fridge, as you can see from the fogged up glass in the picture. Do not put cheese on this, because it ruins it. Baresi propose that you brown breadcrumbs in oil to sprinkle over it, but I never bother. And now, we will send this off to Presto Pasta Night.
October 5th, 2007
I am learning to use the new camera. Once I figure out what all the settings are, I should produce better photos, but this camera has possibilities the 10 year old one never dreamed of, and there’s definitely a learning curve. So yesterday I decided to make a very simple pasta and use the camera to illustrate the process while also exploring what I’ve read on the blogs of much better photographers than I.
The pasta is almost “aglio e olio” which is almost as simple as it gets with pasta. The only ones I can think of that are simpler is with just butter or with just oil.
These are the ingredients I used with the pasta.
I bought those cherry peppers to see how hot they were. Barb and I were discussing this only last week. The answer is pretty hot, but not atomic. I used half of one for one serving and it was pleasantly piquant for me, and maybe too hot for most Umbrians. The cherry tomatoes are from a Puglian vendor and are just as sugary sweet as I recall them being in Puglia. That could be a problem in some dishes, but it won’t be in this one. The photo was taken outside in full sun. Most good photographers recommend that, and I love the shadows and the flooding light. I wouldn’t love my pasta so much if it had to go outside before eating it.
I heated the water to boiling, salted it and put the penne in to cook before I started the sauce. The penne I used are from Gragnano, which is a word you should look for. It’s a place where they still do dried pasta the traditional way, and it doesn’t cost more. It actually costs less than better-known pastas. It takes up to 10 minutes (they say) to cook penne, but I think between 8 and 9. That’s how long it will take to make the sauce.
I heated the frying pan and added good olive oil, then the minced half of the cherry pepper and about 1/4 teaspoon of salt to sauté for a few minutes. I then added one minced clove of garlic and a ladle full of the pasta water, which is about 1/2 cup. Five minutes into the cooking of the pasta, I added cherry tomatoes which I had halved or quartered, depending on the size, and this is what it looked like at that point. Note that I see the steam, but the lens isn’t steaming up. I wonder if that is because it is so much smaller than the previous lens?
Once the pasta was done to my decidedly al dente taste, I drained it and quickly added it to the simmering sauce, plated it and put a little aged, grated Pecorino on it. I later added more, but I didn’t take the chance that it wouldn’t taste right and my pasta would already be covered in it. There are many things I will do for this blog but eating really bad food is not one of them.
That’s the least successful of all the photos. I haven’t yet really got a handle on doing close-up shots yet and the part that is in focus is in the middle of the plate while the leading edge is out of focus. I bought this camera largely for it’s superior ability to deliver macro photography, so obviously I need to read that part of the manual a few more times.
But the pasta was good, maybe even great. I could have eaten the same bowl twice, as a matter of fact. As they always say, the first law of Italian cookery is to choose the ingredients right and to respect them. It turns out that cherry peppers and very sweet cherry tomatoes make pleasant companions in the mouth.
It would also work to toss in some cooked white beans toward the end. What I’ve made here is the beginning of many Puglian pastas, to which are added the vegetables and fish which are the important things in the Puglian kitchen. This spiced oil would end up with beans and mussels to make the single best thing I ate last Spring in Puglia. I am going to offer this to Ruth for Presto Pasta Night, but shan’t be hurt if she turns it down, because it is just as much about a camera as it is about pasta.
I need to go back. To Puglia
The next day: Today I did the same thing only added beans instead of pasta. That was yummers!
So then I wandered over to Olga’s to talk about what an Umbrian would do with these peppers, and there were all the roofers taking coffee in her kitchen. They all had chili stories!
When they left, Olga and I decided to see where the heat is. We slivered off first flesh, nope. Then seeds, nope. I found it in the membranes and had to be stuffed with bread because I was ON FIRE!
September 17th, 2007
When classes are forming, I will post openings here.
April 19th, 2008 we have up to four openings. Pasta plus. Five course meal.
These are all at the school itself in the countryside just outside Città di Castello.
September 11th, 2007
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