Yes please, I'll have me some of that: A simple one pot pasta with tomatoes and basil

Here's a shout out to Food52.  They're an cooking-oriented website that covers a lot of territory, has a great attitude, and consistently puts out good content that I want to read (and recipes I want to cook).  I get their e-mail newsletter several times a week, and there's always something I want to try.  Check it out if you haven't.  It seems that they're pretty successful, and I hope that the appearances are true, because they deserve to be.  So, they don't really need a shout out from me, but today was special.

I was reading Food52 at lunch time, like I often do, and saw this "genius recipe" for one pan tomato pasta, clicked over, saw the lovely picture, and started reading.  The idea is simple, true genius, and I wished I'd thought of it myself. Turns out, it was Martha Stewart who thought of it.  Apparently, this was all the rage a while ago on the Internet, but I missed it.  It's dead easy and delicious.  And I just had to make it tonight. 

Here's why.....the garden tomatoes are starting to come in. And the basil is doing well.  I had onions and garlic in the pantry and a some whole wheat pasta spaghetti.  It was a no-brainer.

The recipe is indeed as easy as looks.  You just dump all the ingredients in a straight sided skillet (called a sauteuese).   There's enough water to just cover the pasta.  You boil it for 10 minutes (they say 9, but my spaghetti was whole wheat, and it said 10), and you've got a meal.  Top with a little Parmesan cheese and your set.  Yum. Go look at their recipe.  It works!  Prep time...5 or 10 minutes, tops.

A few notes.  When I looked at the quantity of salt (2 teaspoons for a dish that makes four servings), I was sure it would be too salty.  But it wasn't.  And I chiffonaded the basil leaves and tossed them in right at the end of the cook time so they just wilted into the dish rather than cooked.  It's better for fresh basil not to be cooked.  And you just use raw onions--no sauteing first--the 10 minutes of cooking in the starchy water was enough to sweeten up those onions so they were mighty tasty.

And click over to their link to other one pot pasta meal "spinoffs".  There's bound to be something tasty there!

Late summer tomato and pasta collision

 

It's cooling off enough to cook inside again (even though it was unseasonably warm today). The flip flops are stashed in the closet, and I haven't been wearing shorts too much any more. There's a brief period of time when fresh tomatoes are available, but it's cool enough to cook them. So last weekend I spent the morning hauling rock for next year's raised beds and roasting some plum tomatoes scored from Wilson Farm. I've written about the roasted tomato thing before, so I won't repeat. Go for the original Molly Wizenberg version -- that's what I did. Suffice to say, that roasted tomatoes on hearty bread, perhaps with some goat or other soft cheese is heavenly. I tricked the season a little by doing them on the gas grill outside, so it wouldn't heat up the kitchen.

But that effort only used up about 1/4 of the four quarts of tomatoes I brought home. What to do?
Susan brought home some fresh pasta (with herbs de Provence) from the Lexington farmers market from Nella Pasta -- a small pasta maker that uses the Crop Circles shared kitchen in Jamaica Plain.  (More on shared kitchens in another post).
Enter the vegetable drawer in the fridge, with zucchini and summer squash, some garlic, onion, and a little time (not thyme), and it made the perfect accompaniment to the fresh pasta.
What I loved about creating this dish was how the vegetables changed over the half hour or so on the stove.  At the beginning, it didn't look like much.  And didn't taste like much.  But a little simmering concentrates that tomato flavor, softens up the squashes, and melds in the onion and garlic.  By the time the pasta was ready, the vegetables were soft but not mushy.  And the few splashes of red wine added enough depth to really round out the dish.  A little salt and grinds of black pepper finished it off for a fine dish.  You could add some Parmesan cheese if you want, but really, the veggies tasted wonderful, so no real need.

1 medium onion, diced
1 zucchini, medium, diced
1 summer squash, medium, diced
6 plum tomatoes, seeded and diced
3 cloves garlic, lightly crushed, to stay in one piece
1 handful of swiss chard (from the garden!), chopped (stems removed...you can use them if you want)
olive oil
red wine
1/2 pound fresh pasta
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil gently, and add the garlic and onions.  Let those cook easily while  seeding and dicing the tomatoes.  Add them when ready and continue to cook slowly.  Start a pot of water for the pasta.  Dice the squashes, and add them after about 10 minutes.  Remove the garlic.

Continue to cook gently while the pasta water boils.  After about 10 minutes or so, and add the chard. Add some more olive oil if desired, and a few splashes of red wine.

When the water boils, cook the pasta until it's done (only a couple of minutes if you're using fresh pasta).

Drain the pasta, and serve with the vegetables.

Linguine ala Carbonara - Extreme

First of all, Happy New Year!  I started this post just after New Year, and am just getting around to finishing it off.

My New Year's eve experiment was to do a recipe out of Jim Lahey's new book, My Bread. Walnut bread, with raisins and a subtle cinnamon flavor. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures. Fortunately, it was fantastic!! My first foray beyond the pretty basic no-knead approach I'd been using since Bittman first popularized the technique a few years ago. But I digress. Hopefully, I'll make it again, and report back.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon Dave's Fresh Pasta in Davis Square, where I discovered fantastic sandwiches. Fantastic. If you've never been, go.  You won't be sorry.  It's hard to imagine getting wound up over a sandwich, but check it out, you'll see.

But it's called Dave's FRESH PASTA, so I thought if they were so good at sandwiches, they'd have to be wizards at pasta.  I hadn't ever paid much attention to fresh pasta before, other than the gluey stuff you get at the supermarket. At Dave's they've got four or five basic pasta types (plain, black pepper, tomato, spinach). And they say a pound will serve 3 or 4.  But when I saw the size of a half-pound black pepper linguine, I figured it would never be enough, so got another quarter pound  The half pound would've been fine -- lesson -- listen to the experts.  

I've been making Spaghetti Alla Carbonara for years, and it was always a family favorite.  With bacon as a central character, how could it not be?  This was to be different, however.

First, I used guanciale instead of bacon, that I procured on my last trip to Seattle, to Salumi.  I'd been wanting to try guanciale for some time, and Salumi had some on their special board, so I picked up a quarter pound to bring home.  Guanciale, by the way, is pork jowls.  Cured.

So I got a pot of water going for the pasta, and got the diced guanciale going in the skillet.  Meanwhile, I mixed two beaten eggs with a few glops of half-and-half, and a half cup or so of parmesan cheese made nice and fluffy by my new microplane and quite a few turns of the pepper mill.

When the guanciale was crisp, it was time to immerse the pasta for a couple of short minutes, until al dente tender, a quick drain, back into the pot and add the egg mixture and the guanciale.  Stir quickly to let the eggs cook in the heat of the pasta, and serve while hot.

The pasta was unlike anything I'd ever had.  It had taste. A depth of flavor that I really don't expect from pasta.   And texture -- silky but with some backbone..  And the carbonara treatment was perfect to accentuate all the fun of the fresh pasta.  I think I'm now spoiled.  It's going to be difficult to go back, except that it's not as easy to keep fresh pasta in the cupboard for months on end.