Quadretti alla sorrentina

The above are all the ingredients in this pasta dish. The tomatoes are already marinating in oil, garlic and salt, with scissored off slivers of basil. The mozzarella has been dried off a bit and then cut into cubes of about one centimeter of a fat 1/4 inch. All you have to do is boil the quadretti in salted water for 3 minutes, drain the water off, then add first the mozzarella, stirring it in to make it thread and then the tomato mixture. I reckon about ten minutes for the whole meal, other than the time you allow the tomatoes to be on their own with their friends.

These are fresh from the supermarket. I don’t know anyone who makes such tiny ravioli, and I think I am not likely to ever meet such a cook. It’s hard to use the tiny amount to fill a normal stuffed pasta. These must hold 3 atoms worth. Cute, though. I think I’d like them best in broth.

The ghosts of delicious

I walked into the Coop supermarket the other day and the first this I saw was these. I wasn’t sure what they were, but I went immediately to see them, then I noticed that there were four different kinds of peaches lined up on the first counter one sees. On the left were red ones so dark they were almost black. Next came peaches that look just like an illustration in a horticulture book. The third ones were normal white peaches, with rosy cheeks and a slight greenness to the skin. These were the last. Icy White Peaches, as translated.

It was only then that I saw the man standing at the end of that counter. He smiled at me and said, “I have been entertaining myself watching people react when they first see these peaches. Aren’t they beautiful?”

They are. I bought these. I’m waiting for them to soften and be really ripe, and then I will make Bellini and peach shortcake for somebody. I don’t know who. I would make them for him, but I don’t know who he is.

Friggitelli

My mother grew these in Maine when I was a child. She and I were the only ones who liked them. I remember that sometimes she made a frying pan full of them with garlic and I am sure corn oil, because she did not use olive oil in those days. Nobody did except maybe Dean Martin or Perry Como.

They’re still that good, but alas, I can only eat three or four at a time and this bunch is lasting forever.

Why roast tomatoes?

I bought some really red San Marzano tomatoes to make sauce and discovered they were almost tasteless. Roasting concentrates what taste they do have. Washed, split, laid on a baking sheet and lightly oiled. It’s actually easier to oil them piece by piece in a small bowl of oil. Scatter them with salt and put them in a low temperature oven for a couple of hours.

And they come out like this. The skins come off easily and you can make anything with them.

Or you can eat them like supersweet candy, which accounts for the gaps in this photo.

A Garden View

This is the view out my window as it was on March 21, 2010.

This is the same view yesterday afternoon, same window, same garden.

This is the window. It’s my basil patch.

Potatoes

Amelia was digging potatoes this morning as the sun shone bright and hot.

Cookalong part two

The original post won’t open all the way anymore, so starting over is what must be done.

This is most of what will go into the shrimp pasta

Here are 8 raw large shrimp, peeled and deveined, fresh heavy cream, garlic, butter (in that covered dish behind) and pepper.

Shrimp stock

I put the shells and tails into a tiny pan, added water and boiled a minute or two. I am missing the crucial pictures of making the sauce, but they just weren’t in the camera! It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.

Shrimp and Black Pepper Pappardelle

First I made crunchy breadcrumbs for topping the pasta, but I honestly wouldn’t do it again, even thogh they look great. It’s traditional on fishy pastas, but to me it resembles sand or ground glass a bit too much in the teeth. I heated oil with minced garlic, some cayenne pepper then the dry crumbs which I make and keep all the time. Stirred about a bit they brown and absorb the flavors.

I started the pasta water to boil. I heated a wide frying pan with 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil. In that I fried the garlic slices until they started to become translucent. I added 1 ounce of sweet butter, a pinch of salt and as soon as the butter melted I added the shrimp. Immediately I started to grind pepper over the dish. It really only takes moments, so as soon a you turn the shrimps over, add about 3 tablespoons of the shrimp stock and then about 3 tablespoons of fresh heavy cream. Throw the pasta into the boiling water and when they rise to the top, lift them out and into the frying pan. Stir about and continue to grind pepper over it. Taste for salt and correct.

Use tongs to lift the dressed pasta into pasta bowls. Sprinkle the optional bread crumbs over all and serve immediately.

This dish took less than 10 minutes to make once the shrimp were peeled and the pasta was made, so if you purchased pasta and peeled shrimp, that would allow this to be a rapid meal. Faster than driving to Burger King for sure.

I liked this a lot. It achieved exactly what I wanted which was to keep the shrimp from overcooking, to keep as much of the sweeter shrimp taste as possible by using only sweetening ingredients, like cream and butter and garlic, and was made with the minimum of ingredients possible. I’ll not do the crumbs again, but I’ll certainly make this pasta and use these shrimps again. They were really delicious.

5:59

I am competely out of appetite, but I’l soldier on and make my neighbor eat the pasta. It also looks like my keyboard has gone kablooey, too.

We left me last breaking open these super legs with a hammer. It’s easier to open cooked crab legs, but this was the right things to do in this case. I was told in Florida that when you catch these crabs you take one leg and the crab re-grows it. Very handy, I think. This one showed signs of a cold water life, I thought, with nice yellow fat here and there.

Crab stock, simmered 10 minutes

In order to keep this dish as sweetly crabby as I like, I put 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and 2 tablespoons of butter into a frying pan. Over gentle heat I sautèed one broken chili pepper which appeared to be the kind they make Tabasco from, 2 small cloves of sliced garlic and half a medium onion, chopped rather small. As soon as the onion was translucent, I added about 1/2 cup or 125 ml of crab stock and let the vegtables cook until the stock boiled away. I added the crab meat and sautèed it just until it was opaque, then I added the maledetto tomato. Check for salt, but mine needed none.

The crab pasta

Those red pieces of tomato fillet look good, don’t they? But they aren’t, so if you want to make this dish, use pieces of roasted red pepper instead. The tomato was unpleasant.

This pasta was superb. Once I yanked out the tomato pieces, I purred as I ate it. I could only have been happier if it had been lobster instead of crab, and I would have prepared it precisely the same way. Cooking it from raw definitely give you a superior result.

I can’t imagine ever being hungry again, but maybe after Bollywood, after ironing, who knows? Anyway, those Californians are hardly even out of bed by now.

I’m sending both these cookalong posts to Presto Pasta Night, hosted this week by Kate at Thyme for Cooking in the Bordeaux region of France.

A cookalong trial

In California today, Saturday 7 August, a group of people are gathering in the kitchen of one of them to cook together. They also drink and snack and get silly, but that’s the nature of gatherings, right? It was suggested that some of us way too far away to join in might cook separately and report, as they will, on the dish(es) cooked and the progress made. Naturally they will eat together what they’ve made. Those of us not there will eat alone, poor us.

People generally make something they consider a specialty, a strong point, even a signature dish. I suppose they try to fit their choices together into a menu that works, or sort of works, but I don’t know that for sure. Lucky me, I don’t have to care what they made!

I decided that my strength lies in inventing recipes using found foods. My other strength is profound grounding in Italian cooking philosophy. I will prepare two or three dishes based on these things and try to remain sober while so doing. My dishes will be done way ahead of theirs, because there’s no way I can stay awake to cookalong with a nine hour difference, and besides, there’s a Bollywood movie on tonight and I always iron while watching Bollywood movies. That makes my house the crispest and smoothest in town during the Bollywood season.

This is what will be in my crab pasta

What I am planning is a pasta made from crab legs, a pasta made with giant shrimp and a main dish salad with grilled shrimp. These seafoods all come from a newish shop in town which sells frozen seafood from all over the world from help yourself bins. Umbria has no coast, so a lot of our fish is thawed and previously frozen. I reckon that if I am the one in charge, I’ll know it’s been handled correctly, right? Plus I am dying to find out how good these particular items are.

I’ll be posting updates with pictures as the day goes on. I was up at 5:58, coffeed and on the road for my daily exercise by 7:00, emptied the trash and the compost bin and now I am ready to roll. My connection is still slow and has failed twice this morning, but patience I will find and eventually all will find its way here — or it won’t!

12:46

So far, so good. The photos are not getting uploaded very fast, but most of them get there.

This is the beginning

I weighed 200 grams of 00 flour, which is our commonest flour, added a good pinch of salt and then made a well in it and added two eggs. This is what it looks like after being stirred up a bit with a fork and my hands. The start is always messy because the whites don’t behave. By dint of scraping and kneading, however, I did get a nice dough that weighed about 300 grams. I put it in a plastic bag to keep it moist and left it alone while I did other things. You don’t have to rest it, but it is marginally more manageable if you do.

One sixth of the dough

I recommend that until you are really a dab hand at rolling pasta, you divide the dough into pieces roughly 50 grams in weight. That is 1/6th of what I made here and this is what it looks like. The first step in rolling is fold and roll, fold and roll at number 1, which makes your pasta have layers and ensures that every molecule of flour is drenched in egg– although the resting will usually take care of that anyway.

Taglierini

I made half into taglierini

and half into pappardelle.

then, using a silicone pastry brush, I cleaned all the flour off the little pasta roller and put her into her box, where she has lived the last 30-odd years, on both sides of the Atlantic.
At this moment, the worst that can happen to me is that I must eat fresh pasta. I can think of worse fates. I have no appetite yet because I ate an American breakfast, so everything can sit here and dry on its nice fresh dish towel. Later, folks.

14:16

Cooking by hammer. These crabs, which resemble stone crabs only much bigger, have shells as thick as plates. Nutcrackers bedamned, it takes a hammer. Hope I find all the pieces of shell, because shell bits drive eg cahrayzee.

Still, it’s important, because I need to get the meat out raw to be sure it doesn’t go all salty as so many times crab will do when boiled in the shell. These are sure not my beloved Chesapeake blues!

Don’t forget to drop by Friday, August 20 to see the many pasta dishes that will come from around the world to be published as Presto Pasta Nights on Thyme for Cooking, hosted by Kate.

This explains some questions I have often asked

http://dailysquee.com

Connectivity

I am experiencing real problems. The connection claims to be at its normal speed, but id either blocked or moving so slow that I can’t get a whole page to load. That’s why I haven’t been able to edit posts. The edit page comes up with just a header and a title.

I am overdue for a new connection via radio that was supposed to be installed last week. This is Italy and everything stops Sunday. In Italia Agosto non esiste.