The Kitchen Illiterate

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.

Continue reading Fettuccini with Spicy Broccolini

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.

Continue reading Acorn Squash and Sausage with Gemilli