It's been a while since I've cooked at home, and the last few weeks have been one of those periods where all I eat is junk/fast food, so last night I took what little initiative I had and trekked off to the local grocer to grab a few things to make a simple, hearty pasta. I took a quick glance at the all but empty fridge and cupboards, only to see some bacon, a wedge of Romano cheese and half an onion, so a carbonara like pasta came to mind. I knew I wanted something rich and heavy. Something filling and comforting. As my diet has been crap anyway, bacon and cream didn't concern me the least.

As far as Carbonara goes, I've seen it made a dozen ways, some use egg, some reduce cream, some add thicken the cream with roux or cornstarch, some add so much cheese you'd think they were making mac and cheese. I'm somewhere in the middle, and it often depends on the exact type of dish I'm aiming for. In this case, I knew I wasn't going for a traditional interpretation of Carbonara anyway, so I took a little of each approach.

I wasn't even sure what I was going to put in the dish when I got to the store. I was half thinking the traditional peas, but wanted something a little fresher with a bit more "green". Then I saw some "baby" portobellas. For those who do not know this, Portobella and the "baby" portobella mushrooms are basically just mature white button mushrooms that we've all seen in the market for years. Because they are more mature, they have a bit more earthiness than the little white buttons that American consumers came to expect along with their iceberg lettuce back in the 70s. I digress.

Armed with an 8 ounce pack of sliced "baby 'bellas", I then grabbed some hydroponic "baby" spinach. I'm not sure why marketers haven't coined a better phrase than "baby" for vegetables, but in the case of spinach, I tend to opt for the baby option simply because I don't like having to sit there and stem the more mature leaves. If the option to buy bunch spinach is available, I'll take that every time.

A pint of heavy cream, some garlic and a package of fresh fettucini later, I was heading back to the house. I tend to not eat fettucini, but when I do, I always buy fresh. I just do not like how dried fettucini cooks up, no matter how much water I cook it in. It's just too thick and pasty for my taste, no matter the dish.

So, all told I have:

• .5lb raw bacon
• 1/2 of a Vidalia Onion diced
• 4 cloves of garlic minced
• 8oz sliced mushrooms
• 5oz baby spinach leaves
• 1 pint heavy cream
• approx. 1/2 cup shredded Romano cheese
• 8oz fresh fettucini noodles

Standard items such as kosher salt, a pepper mill, olive oil as well as a couple tablespoons all purpose flour were also used.

First step was to render the bacon. In this case, I thinly sliced the bacon and cooked it over medium heat in a heavy bottom sauté pan until crispy. Make sure you occasionally stir the bacon around, as the solids from the fat will settle to the bottom of the pan; you don't want to scorch them. Also, depending on the size of the pan, you want to make sure the bacon cooks evenly. Once the bacon is crispy, with a slotted spoon remove the bacon to a plate lined with a paper towel, or in my case, I save brown paper bags for this, to absorb any additional grease.

Pour off most of the bacon fat, obviously being careful as hot bacon grease burns are no fun. Pouring it off into a clean Pyrex measuring cup or some other clean heat resistant container allows you to save it for future use. If not saving it, at least allowing it to cool makes it much easier to discard later. As far as future use, health concerns aside, a tablespoon added to some other oil adds a lot of flavor, be it green beans, potatoes, you get the idea. I doubt I need to rehash the "pork fat rules" mantra that's been made so famous by some guy on TV…

So, with a little of the bacon fat already in the pan, we can add our onions, garlic and mushrooms, and cook over medium high heat until the mushrooms have completely given up their moisture. You may need to add a little oil to the pan depending on how much bacon fat you left in the pan, as mushrooms have a propensity to absorb fat before they give back their moisture, which is the goal. Otherwise, the mushrooms will release their juice back into the sauce, muddying it up and thinning it out.

Once the mushrooms, garlic and onion are sufficiently cooked down (give or take 5 minutes, depending on the level of heat and size of the mushroom), I simply dusted the mixture with a couple of tablespoons of the flour. This serves two purposes. It's going to bind with any remaining fat, to keep our sauce from being greasy, and it's going to help thicken the sauce. Bear in mind the goal is to only have enough fat to keep the vegetables from sticking, and only enough flour to bind with remaining fat. Too much of either and you'll get a gloppy mess. Less is definitely more here. If the sauce needs to reduce a little, or you need a little more cheese, that's fine. Trying to add liquid back to the glue to thin it out not so much fun.

Stir the flour into the vegetable mixture over medium heat for a minute or two, giving a little time to cook out a bit of the starch. You can now add your cream, and reduce the heat a bit. You may have noticed I haven't added the spinach yet, as A) I like my spinach nice and green, and B) since it's the small "baby" type, it will take even less time to cook. So now you can add the spinach, stirring it into the sauce. As with the mushrooms, the spinach will give off a little liquid, but that's OK with me. Once the spinach is wilted, stir in about 1/2 a cup of grated cheese, and check the consistency. It may need to cook down a bit, or add a touch more cheese. One thing to always remember about pasta sauces is that the pasta will absorb a bit of the sauce, so you always want it a bit thinner than your final product, especially if you'll be adding the pasta in the sauce as in this case.

I've mentioned it before, but I generally put my pot of water on for the pasta about the same time I make the sauce. Depending on the complexity of the sauce, I'll either keep it on medium, or go straight to high. This way, I can time the pasta with the sauce. I hate nothing worse than having cooked pasta sitting in the strainer cooling and clumping. So we've got our boiling, salted water. For wider noodles like fettucini, I will add a tablespoon or so of olive oil, simply to help keep the pasta from sticking as the starch is released, thin pastas I skip the oil. With fresh noodles, it only takes about 2-3 minutes in a roiling boil. Basically when the noodles are completely floating, you can remove and strain. Completely drain the fettucini, as we don't want to thin out the sauce anymore than it is (that is, unless it's gotten thicker than you want. A little pasta water is a great way to thin a sauce, much better than tap water).

Toss the noodles in the sauce, adjust the salt (though between the bacon, cheese, and properly salted water for the noodles it shouldn't need much), top with a little fresh grated cheese and cracked pepper, and enjoy!

As the first cool evenings in over four months descended upon the subtropics I call home, and the weariness of the long summer began to lift, a box of casareccia I had sitting in the pantry caught my eye. I had never actually used that cut of pasta before, but came across a De Cecco brand box in one of those "surplus" stores. In my opinion, De Cecco pastas are the premier brand of dried pasta, and always snag as much as I can when I find it on special. Anyway, the box had been calling to me from the pantry, and with the slightly cooler weather, I decided it was time to put it to use. Casareccia is Sicilian in origin, and is a twisted, tube shaped pasta, which I thought would lend itself to a brothy type sauce. So off to the market I headed, armed only with a vague idea of what I wanted to make.

On the drive to the market, I started thinking sausage, but wasn't in the mood to drive to a proper Italian market for it, so I knew immediately I was going to be taking a risk. I so rarely have been getting the urge to be creative in my cooking, I didn't want to squash the urge by a going on a long foraging run. I simply opted for our local chain grocer's "Green Wise" (for those who are familiar with Publix) spicy Italian (as it turned out, they were quite flavorful and sufficient for this dish). These were the large links, not small rope. Either way, I knew I was going to be cutting them into smaller chunks raw, and building the sauce from there. A note to vegetarians – this dish would we equally good without the sausage, or substituted with a commercial vegetarian sausage product like the Boca™ brand Italian sausages.

My next instinct was rapini, but alas none to be had in the produce section. I did a quick walk through, and nothing really jumped out. For a brief moment I had some broccoli flowerets in my basket, but quickly returned them. I often enjoy beans with my pasta, and decided to grab a can of cannellini beans. Knowing I didn't have any broths/stocks to speak of, I opted for a box of Swanson's organic vegetable broth. I knew I could build a lot of flavor with the sausage, and didn't want to over power the dish with chicken broth or worse, beef. (This proved to be a great decision.) I then headed back to the produce section to round out the ingredients so I could head home and cook.

I still wanted something green, but still nothing was jumping out at me, until I saw a bag of organic baby arugula. A nice big vine ripe tomato seemed to be perfect final touch. By this point, the dish had materialized in my head, so a quick mental inventory of what I knew I had at home (sweet onion, butter, and pecorino cheese), I knew I was ready to start cooking.

I'm sure I've written about it before, but I always like to put my pasta water on before i start the rest of the dish. This accomplishes two things. First, if I have any vegetables to blanch, I can use the water for both. Nothing will hurt cooking pasta in some water that's had a few green vegetables in it first. Second, this way, you're not having to wait around, or precook the pasta. In this instance, I wanted to peel and seed the tomato before using it. Certainly one could use can tomato for this, but I didn't want a lot of tomato, and there's nothing like fresh tomato. So I went ahead and cored the tomato, and scored the bottom so when the water came to a boil, I'd be ready.

As I mentioned, I wanted to cook the sausage from a raw state to build a base for the sauce. I wasn't looking for bulk sausage, rather, manageable, almost bite sized (after cooking) pieces. So I heated my trusty enamel coated cast iron dutch oven over medium heat with about a tablespoon of olive oil (just enough to help get the sausage started, there's enough fat to render out to provide the rest). I also julienned about a quarter of a large sweet onion and minced 3 cloves of garlic while the pan was heating.

I began to brown the sausage first, and as it began to brown, added the onions. I wanted a little caramelization on the onions, but not too much, thus I didn't add them at the beginning. As the onions and sausage browned, I added the garlic. Again, the same principle, I didn't want to brown the garlic, but didn't want it raw either.

At this point, I turned the heat up a bit, and deglazed the pan with about one and a half cups of the vegetable broth. If any bits of the sausage or onion are "stuck" to the bottom of the pan, gently scrap them with a wooden spoon to loosen. This really is where the foundation of the flavor comes from. Reduce the heat to low, add the can of cannellini beans, and by now the the pasta water should be at a boil, and you can put the tomato in.

If you've never peeled and seeded a tomato before, you are basically blanching the tomato until you see the skin begin to lift away from the flesh. Remove the tomato with a slotted spoon, allow to cool a bit, and then you should be able to easily peel away the skin. Cut the tomato in half around it's equator, and gently squeeze the seeds out. If you were doing a lot of tomatoes for a fresh sauce, or gazapacho for instance, you might squeeze the seeds out over a strainer and reserve the liquid to add back into your dish. In this instance, I only wanted to concasse (the "flesh"). Rough chop the tomato and add it to the sauce.

Add roughly two cups (or in my case, two big handfuls) of the baby arugula, again, not to early in the cooking process, as you don't want to cook it to mush, just wilt it. To give the sauce a nice rich, velvety consistency, I finished it with a big pat of whole butter and a couple tablespoons of grated pecorino cheese. Adjusted the seasoning (a pinch of salt, a few twists of fresh cracked pepper and a pinch of oregano was all it needed for me), and tossed with the cooked and drained pasta.

Again, the goal is a bit of a brothy sauce, so bear in mind that pasta will continue to absorb liquid, so if you aren't planning to serve this immediately, you might want to hold off on tossing it until just before serving. You can always warm the pasta in the sauce if necessary, among other techniques, all of which have their proponents and detractors.

Some freshly grated romano, some crusty bread if you so desire, and a glass of red table wine would make a perfect meal, perhaps rounded out with a simple garden salad.

I'm quite intrigued by this piece of equipment, but not so much to spend the $238 on it. Basically it was designed to replicate a cooking style of Olive Pickers, who, limited in their supply of water, cooked their pasta in a similar fashion as risotto, versus our traditional manner of vast amounts of boiling water. I'm sure it was meant for more macaroni type pastas, and Earthier types of dishes, but nonetheless, I'm sure it yields a delicious meal. I'm very fond of simple, rustic dishes, and this seems right up my alley.

Add to that the developer is Alain Ducasse, on of the world's most renown chefs, and it becomes a piece of art, as much as a utilitarian tool. I might have to test the concept with my enamel over cast iron dutch oven.

Hat tip to Uncrate

Standard tomato sauces barely pass musterI've embarrassingly neglected this site for some time now, in regards to posting, and I'm trying to break that habit. I've got a few dishes in the can, so to speak, but some recent feedback wanting a full recipe has me working on a way to implement that idea before posting.
In the meantime, I found this article in the San Francisco Chronicle discussing a blind taste test of jarred tomato sauces. I have horrible nightmares of my childhood eating over cooked spaghetti with a jar of Rag

Well, as the week winds down, I wanted to enjoy a nice dinner with my muse, so after a failed trip fishing in the morning, I head to the market. Some nice looking bay scallops and small white shrimp seemed just the ticket. I had some fennel bulb left over from the Moroccan shrimp, so I decided to grab a couple of lemons and make a broth. A can of artichoke hearts, and some perfect pencil sized asparagus rounded out the dish.

As normal, angel hair pasta is the de facto pasta around my home, and, as normal, I like to get the water going right away, as I will use the same water to blanch the asparagus as well as cook the pasta. This asparagus is so tender and thin, it could actually skip the blanching, but since I want to make things quick, I'll give a quick trip to the boiling water anyway.
more