Pasta/Risotto

Those keeping track of my career as a creator of recipes will remember my apple butter buttermilk ice cream which I created last week. This week I present a somewhat loopy, somewhat inspired pasta dish based on a dish Lauren had when we went to Craftbar. That dish was pecorino fondue with honey and hazelnuts. Since I had pecorino in my fridge, honey and hazelnuts on hand I decided to morph that fondue into a pasta dish. And thusly I present to you my Penne with Pecorino, Honey and Hazelnuts.

The process by which I made this was quite simple. I boiled pasta. I grated a cup of pecorino into a bowl. In a saute pan I melted approximately 3 Tbs of butter and a tiny drop (a few tsps) of honey. To this I added about half a cup of pasta water–it sizzles, beware!–and to that I added the pasta. Tossed it all around and added the cup of pecorino. Tossed it all around, added more pecorino to make it cheesier. And then, once poured into a bowl, I added some chopped toasted hazelnuts. Is it respectable to add chopped toasted nuts to a pasta? I’m not sure. But I liked it. This whole dish was a nice twist on my standard pasta with butter, nutmeg and Parmesan. Give it a chance and credit me with the recipe. Well me and Craftbar. But mostly me.

I don’t work for HBO but I wish I did. They produce some of the best television out there–better, in fact, than most of the movies that get released these days. I think “The Sopranos” is the best show in the history of television, and I’ve been watching TV a long time. Not only is it a terrific show, it has its own cookbook. Kirk bought it for me for my birthday (and I, actually, bought one for my brother–a big Sopranos fan–a few years ago when it came out. Does he cook from it? Fuhgetaboutit.) I was wary of whether the recipes would come out but now I feel like a jamook: look how well this rigatoni with sausage and tomato sauce came out.

[If you want to know what a “jamook” is, check out The Sopranos mobspeak dictionary.]

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Sopranos Saucery: Rigatoni with Sausage & Tomato SauceRead More »

Let’s say I have this “friend” and this “friend” (in quotes) recently went to Paris and let’s say when he was in Paris he met lots of people who gave him Parisian foodstuffs and while at a market one day he bought a giant glass bottle of risotto. Let’s say he placed it in his suitcase and flew back to the States, ignoring the directive not to bring in food from outside the country. Let’s say this “friend” has a food blog and would like to blog about the risotto he made from the giant glass bottle of risotto last night. Would he be arrested? Would government agents come knocking on his door tomorrow? Let’s keep talking about him in the third person with pictures “he” provided for me over e-mail. Check out the gigantic glass bottle of risotto:

Why did he buy risotto in Paris? Risotto is Italian. “Well,” he says, “I thought the giant glass bottle was really cool and I don’t remember seeing instant risotto anywhere in the States. Plus, I liked how you still needed butter and wine to make this instant risotto. Parisians may skimp, but they still skimp with style.”

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From Paris, With Risotto [Plus: A Snazzy Salad]Read More »

Food pictures can be erotic, can’t they? See if this picture makes your mouth horny:

Is that the first time I used the word “horny” in a post? I apologize. Did you know my 5th Grade teacher Mrs. White was fired mid-year because she let one of my classmates play that rap song that goes “Me So Horny” during an after class party and one of the mothers was offended. The Monday after that party we came to class and instead of Mrs. White, there was our principal sitting there telling us we’d have a new teacher. We were heartbroken. Ok, not really. We liked our new teacher better. But I wonder where Mrs. White is today. Is she dead? Does her tombstone say: “Me So Horny.” Ok, that was horrible. But maybe a teensy bit funny?

Let’s talk about pasta salad. Pasta salad is incredibly easy to make and incredibly rewarding. All you need is pasta, stuff for dressing, and other stuff to throw in. It’s all very casual. Very cazh. Wear your sandals.

We get this recipe from—come on now, say it collectively: THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA! But it’s from a book one of my readers’ bought me: Barefoot Contessa Family Style which completes my collection. All I need now is Ina’s BMW and her Hamptons home and I’m set.

Here’s what you need:

1/2 pound fusilli (spirals) pasta

OH NO! I thought it said a pound and I used the whole box! That’s why my pasta’s not terribly coated with dressing. But ya know what? It still tasted great. How come it’s not until I type out these recipes that I realize I made mistakes? That tells you something about recipes. Or maybe it tells you something about me.

Anyway:

Kosher salt

Olive oil

1 pound ripe tomatoes, medium diced

1/4 cup good black olives, such as kalamata, pitted and diced

1 pound fresh mozzarella, medium diced

6 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, drained and chopped

For the dressing:

5 sun-dried tomatoes in oil, drained

2 Tbs red wine vinegar

6 Tbs good olive oil

1 garlic clove, diced

1 tsp capers, drained

2 tsps kosher salt

3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1 cup packed basil leaves, julienned (Or Julianned, if Julianne Moore is present)

Cook pasta in large pot of boiling salted water with a splash of oil to keep it from sticking. Boil 12 minutes or according to directions on package. Drain well and allow to cool. Place the pasta in a bowl and add the tomatoes, olives, mozzarella and chopped sun-dried tomatoes.

For the dressing, combine the sun-dried tomatoes, vinegar, olive oil, garlic, capers, salt, and pepper in a food processor until almost smooth.

Pour the dressing over the pasta, sprinkle with the Parmesan cheese and basil and toss well.

So just imagine: I made this wrong and I loved it, how great will this taste when you make it right? And then you can take dirty pictures of it like I did and put it in your wallet. Just don’t let it get you fired like Mrs. White got fired. You need your job to pay for the olives. Unless you don’t like olives. In which case, take all the pictures you like.

There is a link, methinks, between cooking, art and magic. The best evidence I can give to support this theory is from Act 4.1 of Macbeth. Enter the witches.

First Witch: Round about the cauldron go,

In the poisoned entrails throw

Toad that under cold stone

Days and nights has thirty-one

sweltered venom sleeping got

boil thou first i’th’ charmed pot.

A “charmed pot.” That’s what cooking’s all about, is it not? Transformation. A mish-mosh of random ingredients and bang wham pow something new. Which is what I experienced tonight with Alice Waters. I did her recipe for “Summer Squash and Corn Pasta” from her Vegetables book, which a reader so kindly bought me. You need summer squash and corn, to start:

You cut the squash into tiny pieces (“small dice,” says Alice) and you saute it in 1.5 Tbs of olive oil until tender and a bit brown.

Season with salt and pepper. Then you add corn from 3 ears (I halved the recipe, by the way), 2 cloves of garlic cut up and 1/2 a jalapeno cut up too.

You cook that for a bit. It’s all very casual here in Alice-land.

Then add 2 Tbs of butter, a handful of chopped cilantro and 3 or 4 Tbs of water. That’s it! Your sauce! Taste and season accordingly. (Alice says to add lemon juice if the corn is too sweet. I wonder if lime would be good too?)

In the meantime, you’ve prepared some fettucine. Half a pound. Add to the corn and squash mixture, toss about with tongs, and there’s your dinner: [add more cilantro to garnish]

Those noodles all get coated with the browned, sweetened squash; the corn adds texture and more sweetness and then there’s the heat of the jalapeno, the old Jewish grandma-ness of the garlic, and the brightness of the cilantro. It’s the sort of thing that you read and say: “Hmm, but I really wonder what that tastes like?”

Exactly! Back to the beginning: cooking, art and magic. The cooking is the manual labor; the art is what gets added (the recipe) and the magic is what it becomes. Transformation: a charmed pot. And I think the child in me who watched witches on TV throw random things into large cauldrons only to have doves or children or Oprah emerge finds himself in love with cooking most when the resulting product is something that could never have existed but for the enchanted spell (ie: the recipe). Try this recipe and experience some late summer magic before it’s too late! Corn and summer squash don’t last forever.

Walking around New York yesterday was a rather surreal experience. There were cops on every single street corner–sometimes in clusters of threes and fours. Near 8th Ave., barricades upon barricades lined the way to Madison Square Garden, between which protesters stood–in the hot sun–holding signs decrying the horrors of George W. Bush. Red “No Smoking” stickers replaced the cigarette with a “W,” and stores appealed to the political climate with cutesy signs that read, for example: “Feeling Bushed? Kerry yourself inside.”

In many ways this is a good and exciting time to be in New York. In most other ways, though, it’s not. I find myself growing more and more weary of the political scene. Also, I’ll confess, it’s a little bit scary: helicopters flying overhead and sirens wailing past every few minutes. I really want this convention to be over.

Therefore, I decided to do the equivalent of a culinary rain dance: I decided to make a dish more appropriate for fall than summer. Call me a rebel, I can take it. I whipped out my newest Strand cookbook purchase—Tom Valenti’s One-Pot Meals.

I like the concept of this book because you basically end up with a big pot of food that will last you through the week. That’s one of my newest goals in this expensive city: to make food that will last a long while.

Risotto is no such food. It turns gloppy and pasty once it sits in the pot after being taken off the heat. Yet it’s in my fridge right now and I plan to eat it anyway. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

To start, you must buy many things to make this risotto. Among those many things is sage:

Sage is an herb I haven’t worked with much. I am told it complements butternut squash incredibly well. This is appropriate, then, because here’s a butternut squash:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is my first butternut squash. Scary, no?

Now I watched a Sarah Moulton once where she talked about safely peeling and cutting up a butternut squash. Unfortunately, I forgot everything she taught me. So I began by peeling the squash straight down with a vegetable peeler:

This worked fairly well, though the outsides were still tough and bricky. I eventually cut off the outsides with a knife. But before that, I cut the squash in half and scooped away the seeds:

Now Tom has you cut up the squash into half inch squares. This part, I’ll concede, was quite difficult. I almost sliced my thumb off twice. But somehow I made it work:

Then into a pot with 2 Tbs of butter:

Season with salt and pepper and cook “until brown and slightly softened but still holding their shape, about 12 minutes.”

Sadly, it began losing its shape 8 minutes in–begining to resemble mashed sweet potatoes, so I took it off the heat.

Poured it into a bowl with the chopped sage and stirred it around. This won’t get used until later.

Tom has you wipe the pot clean and then put it back on the heat. This leaves glorious brown bits on the bottom that white wine will eventually pick up, giving a huge flavor boost to your risotto:

But first mushrooms. Now I cheated here and I regret it. Tom wants you to separate all your wild mushrooms and cook them separately with 2 Tbs of butter each. But it was getting late, Lisa was coming over, and I wanted to have dinner ready. So I threw all the mushrooms in: (Also, I’d done all the mushrooms at once before when I made the Chez Panisse Wild Mushroom risotto, so I figured I’d be ok):

Unfortunately, I only used 2 Tbs of butter to start and then, halfway through, as the mushrooms got dryer and dryer I realized it was 2 Tbs for each type of mushroom so I quickly added 6 more Tbs of butter. This made the mushrooms way too buttery:

Then I thought about Julia Child and wondered if one could really have too much butter. I yanked a mushroom out and tasted it and it tasted wonderful. Very good, then. I poured the mushrooms into a bowl and tossed with freshly cut thyme. Mushrooms and thyme is a killer combination.

Now, we wipe the pot clean again and add 1 large spanish onion diced. That cooks for four minutes (in olive oil and butter) and then we add 2 cups of Arborio rice:

This is a ton of rice for risotto. Since it plumps up with the liquid, this is way more than two people can heathily eat. No matter. Remember our goal: to eat through the week. And to skip past the Republican National Convention. I peered out my window: still Republicans.

Lisa arrived just as the vegetable broth on the back of the stove began to simmer. I had added wine to the rice and onions and it was now absorbed. The challenge was now to begin: the 18 minutes of frantic stirring and ladeling simmering broth into the risotto. This was a job for a virile, well-endowed kitchen god. This was a job for Lisa:

After 18 minutes (the requisite time), there was still broth left but the risotto looked well brothed. I tasted a spoonful and felt the texture was right. The flavor was off, but we hadn’t added the mushrooms or squash yet.

And that, indeed, is the last step. You add 2 more Tbs of butter, the mushrooms and the squash and you end up with this:

Suddenly, I looked out my window and saw a flurry of white men in suits spinning in a tornadoed mass back to middle America. The helicopters fled the skies, the police left the streets and the only noise was the noise of New York applauding. Lisa and I sat down and ate risotto. And it was good.