pasta – Page 7 – The Kitchen Illiterate

The Ultimate Tuna Noodle Casserole

I have a strange weakness for casseroles. I’m not really sure where it originated. We certainly didn’t eat them growing up. In fact, I think they were almost banned. I seem to recall something about my dad being a little, er, overexposed to casseroles in his 1960s childhood, and the casserole subsequently enjoying least favored nation status in our house. The only childhood casserole I recall is the traditional Thanksgiving Green Bean casserole, but that almost doesn’t count, as Thanksgiving is incomplete with that dish. There were no hamburger pies, no cheesy chicken chili bakes, no turkey tetrazinnis in my past. So why do I get so excited by the thought of a Tater Tot Casserole now?

If you think about what most casseroles actually are, it’s hard for me to understand why people don’t like them. You basically have meat, pasta, and tons of cheese, all mixed together and baked into one-dish perfection. What could possibly be wrong with that? This was supposed to be the winter of casseroles, and it didn’t occur to me until this week that so far, there hasn’t even been one! Of course, there hasn’t really been winter until recently, either.

So tonight is the night. The night of the Ultimate Tuna Noodle Casserole.

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Butternut Squash Lasagna

Because I seem to be on a roll of concocting very messy things in my kitchen, why should tonight be any different? At first glance, Butternut Squash Lasagna doesn’t seem like it should be the messiest project, but you just try grating slightly mushy butternut squash pieces, and then we can talk. Oh, the squash eventually got grated, but so did my fingers.

I realized as I was constructing my lasagna that in all my reading about pasta, and traditional Italian foods, I’d never really come across any information about lasagna. Was it, in fact, an Italian dish, or just another American concoction for the red-checkered tablecloth crowd? I decided to do a little research.

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Artichoke Ravioli with Tuna Caper Cream sauce

Artichoke ravioli with Tuna Caper Cream Sauce

Friday night I got the chance to play executive chef a little bit, and order Mr. X around in the kitchen. Alright, I didn’t really order him around so much as tell him my idea and watch him expertly pull it off. And I mean expertly. This was a tasty dinner. I will do my very best to re-create his methods here, and hopefully, he will correct whatever I get wrong.

We made the artichoke ravioli last weekend. The filling for this was pretty damn simple, and aside from the minor problems I discovered earlier in the week (gummy pasta, not enough filling in each ravioli) they were lovely–light and lemony and almost summery. Which was nice, considering that it was something like 11 degrees here all weekend.

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Balsamic Portabello and Brie Ravioli with Roasted Tomatoes and Broccoli and Truffle Oil

Raviolis and Roasted Veg

Homemade ravioli: simultaneously easier and more difficult than I expected.

We assembled our ravioli on Monday night, and I was surprised at how (relatively) easy it was to make the dough, and get it into the right shapes, and put all the yummy stuff in, and keep all the yummy stuff from falling out. They looked so lovely, and tiny, and the dough was silky, and it was all so tactile and fun. And good smelling.

Last night we decided it was time to cook up one of the two batches we made, and while they were very, very good, something was not quite 100%, and we all know what a perfectionist I am. I am now determined to master the art of ravioli making.

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Homemade Pasta, or The Messiest Cooking Project Ever

Fresh Fettuccini

Last night we decided to embark on the messiest cooking project I believe I’ve ever undertaken: making fresh homemade pasta. Of course, we couldn’t be satisfied with just one big batch of fettuccini or spagetti, oh no. We decided to make three kinds of pasta, fettuccini, and two kinds of ravioli. Yes, two. We were going to go all the way.

Mr. X was doubtful about making pasta without a food processor, but I refused to let lack of machinery stand in my way. After all, people made pasta without a food processor for hundreds of years. If their hands were good enough, then dammit, so were mine! As it turned out, the dough ended up just the right texture for rolling, and wasn’t very difficult at all. It was, however, very messy, and anyone who knows me knows that I’m not always so good with messy. I soldiered through the gloppy flour-covered hands and squishy liquidy ravioli fillings, though, and we ended up with a pretty awesome dinner.

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Whatever’s in the Pantry Pasta, or Cannellini Broccolini Pasta

Cannellini Broccolini Pasta

It has been a bit of a rough week for the kitchen. Around about Tuesday I realized that I was completely broke, AND had a nearly bare pantry. And the combination of winter, evening darkness, and a job I don’t exactly love put me in the mood to do nothing much but sit on the couch, reading Harry Potter and drinking hot toddies. But tonight I knew I would have to figure out the sustenance question eventually, and cobble together some kind of meal from the random remnants on hand.

I actually love this kind of ramshackle cooking. I’ve devised some pretty interesting meals based solely on what was at hand. I’ve also experienced some dinner disasters, but we dont’ need to speak of those. I will just say, stay away from any beet-garbanzo-spaghetti-feta combinations.

So what was in the pantry tonight? I still have those anchovies. In fact I’m beginning to suspect that they are reproducing, alone at night in the refrigerator, because it doesn’t appear I ever have fewer anchovies. I have a can of diced tomatoes, and a can of cannellini beans. I have some slightly bedgraggled looking broccolini, and I think, yes, that this might make a meal. Of some sort.

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Gnocchi with Mushroom Sausage Ragu

I bought pre-made gnocchi at Trader Joe’s last week, and had been wondering all weekend what to do with it. This ragu is, yet again, bastardized from another recipe, this one from Martha Stewart’s Everday Food. Say what you will about Martha, I do have a bit of a weakness for this magazine. And this was a great partner for the gnocchi–rich and really full of flavor, and thick enough to coat the gnocchi, but not too heavy or creamy or fatty.

It took a bit longer than most things I cook, but wasn’t difficult at all, and was well worth the extra time. I’m curious how different it would taste made as the original recipe suggests, without the wine, and with bacon instead of sausage. I also feel like it’s a bit of a cop out, to write about gnocchi when using the packaged kind, but I’m not quite ready to make my own gnocchi. Regardless, this ragu would probably also be awesome with any other kind of pasta, or even over chicken or steak or something (probably not so much over fish, though).

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Fettuccini with Spicy Broccolini

What I really wanted to cook tonight was Orecchiette with Spicy Broccoli Rabe, but the useless hippie mart across the street, of course, had no broccoli rabe. Nor orecchiette. So some substitutions were in order. The impetus behind the meal had nothing to do, after all, with the broccoli rabe (and only a little to do with orecchiette…I love orecchiette), but rather more to do with getting rid of the leftover anchovies in my refrigerator.

So dinner quickly became Fettuccini with Spicy Broccolini. Broccolini is awfully fun to say.

I’m not actually sure why I wanted to cook a dish for the sole purpose of using anchovies. Despite the pleasing puttanesca experience, I’m still not sure I’m an anchovy person. When I opened up the contained they’d been living in for the past month, the smell wasn’t one that made me immediately think, “Yum, I can’t wait to eat those!” And when I pondered this recipe all day, I just kept thinking it seemed too simple, too basic.

Of course, there is something to be said for getting back to the basics where pasta is concerned. I’m in the middle of reading Buford’s Heat right now, and I keep thinking of the refrain, the pasta is what’s important, not what’s on it. Not like my Barilla boxed pasta really deserves odes or anything, but the point is that I’ve been thinking a lot lately about learning the basics, and developing a taste for the simple, easy pasta dishes that focus on just one or two ingredients. That mindset made the idea of eating pasta that was really nothing but broccolini and some anchovies a little more palatable.

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Acorn Squash and Sausage with Gemilli

Last October, at the closing of the JP Farmer’s Market, Mr. X and I went a little overboard with squash. And I’ve been a little worried since then that it wouldn’t really last through the winter. Every few days I’d go into the pantry and check it out, worrying that it seemed a little waxier, a little more orange, than last time. When one of them (a pumpkin) developed little mushy green spots and a decidedly unwell appearance, I tossed it and decided it was about time the others were cooked.

I’d already done a stuffed acorn squash, a spaghetti-style spaghetti squash, a pan-seared delicata, and I wanted to try something kind of different. So I set to perusing my new Williams-Sonoma Pasta cookbook (How much do I love Williams-Sonoma cookbooks? Everything else in the store is crazy overpriced, but they make such gorgeous cookbooks!). Then I bastardized the crap out of the recipe I found.

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Penne Puttanesca

puttanesca

Puttanesca is one of those classic sauces that I’ve always thought would be tasty, but avoided for one reason or another. The reason in this case was anchovies. The only anchovies I’ve ever eaten have been in caesar salad, where they’re really almost indetectable. Oh, and of course once, when the boys at the Bella put one on a pizza I ordered. That was kind of them.

But besides the anchovies, it sounded right up my alley: simple, cheap ingredients, spicy AND salty, and full of capers and olives, two of my favorite things. After reading about it in the Globe last week, I thought that this was finally the time. The time to buy some anchovies.

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