The Hungry Tiger

Baked pasta two ways

We don't eat pasta very often these days (alas), for the sake of Snark's pancreas, but when we have guests and want to make something we're sure everyone will love, it's hard to beat really good baked pasta with cheese. Bad cheesy pasta is gluey, or worse, runny, grainy, watery and lumpy. Bad cheesy pasta is too bland or too weird-tasting, and reminds the eater of cafeteria steam tables. But the good stuff is heavenly. Here are two equally delicious variations, one that's essentially the best macaroni and cheese I know, and one that's a little more chic and autumnal, with butternut squash.

This time of year, I like to get a squash and just bake it on the weekend, when I'm doing something else. Once it's cool, I scoop out the flesh and give it a rough mash. Then it goes into the fridge, all ready to be used in a recipe like this one. This baked pasta is rich and creamy, but never bland or soupy, with plenty of both crispy chewy top bits and pillowy inner bits. I like to serve it with lots of crisp salad -- with vinaigrette and thiny sliced red onions, please! -- and beer. I think that the first iteration of these recipes might have been something from an issue of Cook's Illustrated, but I like my way better than theirs, no matter how much they tested it. (So there!) It's a bit of work, but totally worth it. Serves 4-5 people.

ITEM: Cheese and nuts are good with pasta.

An article in last week's New York Times food section described a particular off-the-menu dish:

A basic tomato sauce is mixed with a pesto of four kinds of raw nuts, which makes a creamless pink sauce with real body, enlivened by the kick of black and red peppers, a generous grating of pecorino and a few ribbons of fresh mint.

It's a crazy combination of bar food -- nuts and cheese -- with noodles, and while it's hard to figure out why it works, it's easy to eat a bowlful as you think about it (though not exactly cheap: $12 as an appetizer, $20 as an entree).

Well, no. The combination of pasta, nuts, and cheese is not crazy in any way, nor is it remotely difficult to figure out why it works. You're weird, Alex Witchel. Still, I followed the accompanying recipe and it was indeed particularly good, and indeed not quite a repeat of anything I've had before. Not crazy, though. Worth noting: Hooray, the Times has now made it possible to generate permanent links to their articles with ease. Look over to the right side of the page on any article. Click on "Share," and choose "Permalink". Right on!

Quinoa salad, Fey's favorite pasta salad

Eating lots of quinoa salad lately. This involves first making a batch of quinoa (1 cup quinoa + 2 cups salted water) and letting it cool, then adding things like roasted red peppers from the jar, sweet corn, feta cheese, halved cherry tomatoes, basil, and so on, plus a vinaigrette and plenty of freshly ground pepper.

I'm also attracted to a recent pasta salad recipe along these lines from the New York Times: very similar, but with pasta, of course, mozzarella instead of feta, and the addition of slow-roasted tomatoes as well as the fresh raw ones.

You take the tomatoes, which conveniently can be subpar or over-ripe, cut them into 3/4" slices, brush with olive oil, and put them in a 275° oven for 15 minutes before turning it down to 200° and leaving it for another 4-6 hours. Then you chop them very very very fine, almost to a paste. Instead of a vinaigrette, you mix these tomatoes with equal parts (2 tablespoons each, in the original) of olive oil and melted butter, plus minced garlic. Sounds good, doesn't it?

Pasta with ricotta cheese and lemon olive oil

Here is the recipe with the most impressive effort-to-deliciousness ratio I've had in quite a while. It does involve a little bit of strategic shopping, but not much, and nice lemon olive oil is very worthwhile and in the company of a little salt and pepper will make any vegetable taste luxurious, so go on and buy it already.

If you are in the happy position of not needing to worry about blood sugar and things like that, you could eat a great big pile of this pasta and nothing else for supper, but it's also excellent in small quantities alongside something else. It would be outrageously good as an accompaniment to an artichoke and was just dandy with the broccoli I posted about last night.

LEMON AND RICOTTA PASTA

Cook some pasta. Ziti would be nice, or pappardelle, or whatever, really. We used these guys, which were superb. Drain it and reserve a tiny bit of the starchy cooking water. Put both back in the pot and add a healthy dollop of ricotta cheese and an unhealthy glug-glug of lemon olive oil. Add some lemon zest, too, if you feel like it, and salt if it needs it. Heat through briefly, grate some pepper over it, and serve. Fin.

Versatile ricotta and greens

I am sure you all already know the handy fact that wonton wrappers, being pasta, can be used to make ravioli. But what you may not know is that leftover ravioli filling makes an outstanding sandwich when tucked inside a toasty pita. I am feeling like Einstein for figuring this out. So good!

The stuff I am eating right this very minute was made like so: I took 1/2 onion and 2 cloves of garlic minced extremely fine (in the food processor) and sauteed them in olive oil. I then added a pinch of dried thyme, a pinch of nutmeg, a tiny pinch of cayenne, salt and pepper. After a minute, I tossed in some chopped parboiled greens and cooked it all together until it was good and thoroughly heated through. I finally dumped the contents of this skillet in a bowl with 1 cup ricotta cheese and mixed it all up together.

This was enough to fill four large ravioli for each of us with enough left over for a generously filled pita and still more left for tomorrow.

On peanuts, noodles, and roasted green things

S. has already written about his peanut noodles. He made a big batch of the sauce the other night -- delicious as usual. We didn't have any rice noodles, so we used udon instead, which worked beautifully. I'm becoming very fond of the simple dried udon I can get at the co-op; there's something so neat and tidy about the way it's bundled, and the length of the noodles is perfect with chopsticks. I've found that it really is important to rinse them in cold water after cooking (if you want hot noodles, you should plunge the cold rinsed noodles into boiling water for a minute, which is sort of a pain, but not much of one if you have a tea kettle): it rinses away the extra starch and gives them their characteristic slippery texture.

Anyway, now we have some leftover peanut sauce, which is a great treat. It's good over lots of different kinds of vegetables, particularly green beans and eggplant. It's also excellent, thinned, as a dipping sauce for lentil or other vegetable croquettes.

What I did tonight was to roast broccoli and green beans. There are very few vegetables, it seems, that do not benefit from being tossed in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, and roasted in a good hot oven. I was never particularly fond of broccoli as a kid, maybe because the usual ways of cooking it -- steaming or even stir-frying -- don't do it justice. But roasted in the oven it gets toasty and dense and very good. There's no need to stop while it's crunchy, because it won't get waterlogged or mushy, and this is a great boon, in my view. A fully-cooked vegetable is a lovely thing. Best of all, they're so easy to make that they hardly qualify as a recipe. Here's what you do:

ROASTED BROCCOLI AND GREEN BEANS

Preheat the oven to 425° F.

Cut up one bunch of broccoli. You can use just the florets, if you are feeling inclined that way, or peel the stems and cut them into chunks. Irregularly sized pieces are fine; the little ones will get crispy and the big ones will provide substance. Take a handful of green beans, or more, and snap off the stems.

Pour a tablespoon or two of olive oil into the bottom of a large baking pan. Tip in the vegetables and shake the pan until they're coated evenly. Sprinkle some nice salt over top and shake again.

Roast for twenty minutes to half an hour, giving the pan a shake every now and again. Serve hot or at room temperature, by themselves or with a sauce; the peanut sauce is very nice indeed, as I said, but so is a shake of sesame oil, or a vinaigrette, or lemony garlic butter, or a fried egg, or nothing at all.

Tomato soup and fizzing water

Plain old cream of tomato soup tonight, with adorable little teeny tiny ravioli floating therein. Leftover soup will get to hang out with grilled cheese, if I know me (and I do). I look forward to the fantasy of a diner meal that will be. I should bake a pie to go with it! (But I won't.) And just to make my tomato soup experiences all the more ideal, it has decided to be cold and rainy tonight. That works out nicely. I'll appreciate my soup and ravioli and rain.

Today I have also been appreciating our lovely soda siphon. It has been resting neglected and half full in our refrigerator for at least a couple of weeks. Today I had a craving for elderflower syrup and soda, but was sure that by now all the carbonaterific virtue would have gone out of the siphon contents. But no! It was perfectly fizzy in every way (how many ways does it take, I now wonder). It was all very exciting. Thanks, Mark!

Pasta with roasted tomatoes, and other thoughts

At last I have replenished our stores of fresh food: eggplant, green beans, snow peas, sweet potatoes, red peppers, basil, scallions, cauliflower, plums. I had wanted to get some carrot juice, too, to use in a recipe for golden rice, but was put off by both the expense and the heavy glass bottles. Maybe another time.

Now of course I am all fired up to cook a lot of tasty savory vegetable things, but tonight we are going to a potluck, and I have been assigned dessert. So good old faithful plum cake it is. I can never quite get over how insanely easy it is to make. It hardly even counts as cooking. Pilafs and roasted vegetables and braising and simmering will have to wait for tomorrow.

As you can maybe tell from the above, I am getting antsy for autumn. It's still pretty darn warm here, and I know that come January I will regret ever objecting to warmth, but right now I have a serious craving for crisp, windy sweater weather and its attendant foods. Hot drinks! Apples! Thick stews! Bubbling cheesy baked things! But no, the moment still really belongs to cold beer and sunscreen. But at least it also belongs to late tomatoes, so tomorrow I will go to the farmer's market and buy some and eat salad after salad after salad. And if it should happen to get chilly after all, we can always roast them and make S.'s delicious roast tomato pasta sauce. It takes a while, but very little work, and it's worth the wait. You could easily make it the evening before and reheat it the next night.

S. made it for me one of my late-evening seminar nights and I couldn't stop exclaiming about how delicious it was. "But no, when I say this tastes wonderful, I mean it tastes really really wonderful!" But then, of course, I never wrote it up, because I am lazy and selfish. I hope you still have time to gather up some end-of-season tomatoes and give it a try.

SPAGHETTI AND ROASTED TOMATOES

2.5 - 3 pounds tomatoes (four or five sizable, very ripe ones)
1 large onion
4 large cloves garlic
12 pitted black olives
about 2 T. fruity olive oil
several leaves of fresh basil
pepper
salt

Preheat the oven to 375° F. Skin the tomatoes via the "cut an X in the bottom and drop it in boiling water" method. Chop the tomatoes into half-inch pieces. Chop the onion fine. Chop the garlic very fine -- S. used our favored technique of mincing it, then adding salt and crushing it with the knife blade to make a paste. Throw the garlic, onion, tomatoes, and olive oil into a baking dish and put it in the oven. Every half hour or so, give it a poke. After an hour, roughly chop the olives and add them and several turns of pepper from the grinder. After about an hour and a half, add the basil. You'll want to roast the tomatoes for around two hours, until most of the liquid has cooked off. Serve over pasta with some fresh mozzarella.

Quoth S.: "The only change I might make next time (if there is a next time; tomato season is winding down) is to use capers instead of the olives."

Spicy lentil sauce for pasta

Yesterday, rice and lentils. Today, pasta and lentils. Let's hear it for scraping through to the end of the fiscal year!

SPICY LENTIL SAUCE

Chop an onion and sauté it in some olive oil. As it begins to grow translucent, add some oregano and some cumin. Chop up some garlic and add that too. When it is all looking limp and cooked, toss in a handful of red lentils. Sauté for a little while, then add water to cover. Turn the heat down to low. Add salt (plenty) and cook until the lentils are falling apart, adding more water as needed. Add lots of freshly ground black pepper, maybe twenty turns of the mill, and a squirt or two of hot sauce.

Toss your (shaped, not long) pasta in it. If you are lucky enough to have some parmesean cheese around, grate it on top.

A pasta dinner

Last night we had a simple dinner of linguine tossed with a lump of fresh cheese with black pepper, some strips of roasted red peppers from a jar, and a small handful of halved cherry tomatoes, plus some chopped parsley. The cheese melted very nicely into a creamy sauce, with just a little of the pasta cooking water to loosen it up a bit. Mixed greens on the side, dressed with my favorite salty-spicy-sweet dressing: equal parts vinegar and sugar heated together until slightly thickened, with a dash of hot pepper flakes. I'm sure some bread would have been a nice addition, but our object was to be lazy, so baking was out of the question.

Instead, I'm going to use my baking capacity today, and make our dear old favorite plum cake, but with blackberries (which happened to be on sale this week) instead of plums. It doesn't do to use fruit that's too sweet for this recipe -- that's also why it's crucial not to peel the plums in the canonical version -- but it's a great use for slightly sub-par, off-season blackberries. And now we'll have a nice dessert to offer tonight's dinner guests, and if we should be so lucky as to have leftovers, they are perfectly perfect for breakfast.

Leeky pasta, "Cooking for losers," and snow

Heaven knows I never thought I would be passing along a link from Metafilter, but Cooking for Losers is pretty darn charming.

We are snowed in in in, ever so snowed in, though I might be motivated to wade through the snow for four blocks in order to get some more dishwashing detergent. There's plenty of food, but while we're luxuriating in our cozy little snowtrap, it would be nicest if we could carry on washing up with the greatest of ease. I wonder if the store is even open, though -- I kind of feel like it shouldn't be (poor employees) but who knows?

Last night I made a really delicious pile of pasta based on a leek recipe from The New Book of Middle Eastern Cooking. (If I were enterprising, I would make a little sidebar for the cookbooks I've been using most lately. Don't hold your breath, though!) First you trim 3 big leeks and cut them into 1-2" pieces, washing them thoroughly of course. Then you crush 3 cloves of garlic and toss them into a few tablespoons of hot oil, along with a tablespoon of sugar. Cook, as Roden says, "for moments only," until the sugar starts to caramelize.

Toss in the leeks and cook a few minutes more, moving them around so they color a bit. Add the juice of one lemon or a splash of vinegar, and some salt. Add just enough water to barely cover and turn the heat down very low. Stew, stirring occasionally, until the leeks are very soft and the liquid is reduced to a syrupy puddle. This will take a while, maybe half an hour? Roden would have you stop there, and serve it hot, cold, or at room temperature as an appetizer or side dish. But I made half a pound of linguine and tossed it with the leeks (this recipe is involving a lot of tossing, I'm noticing!) and some freshly grated parmesean. Plenty of pepper at the table. With half a pound of pasta, there was a very high leek-to-pasta ratio; you could easily do it with a whole pound and the same quantity of leeks, and feed four people.

Vegetarian pho redux

My second attempt at pho was a big success, flavorful and perfectly pho-like and inspiring widespread sentiments of health and wellbeing. It wasn't difficult, but given the substantial difference between this batch and the last one, some attention to detail is obviously called for. The write-up below is thus annotated especially to help highlight potential pitfalls.

In preparation, not on the day when we actually put the pho together, I made the broth. First I made a nice pot of vegetable stock according to my usual method. Then I strained it and put it back into the pot along with a tablespoon of soy sauce; a 1" piece of fresh ginger that I had roasted under the broiler for about 3 minutes, until it started to char; 5 fat cloves of garlic, roughly chopped; 2 cinnamon sticks; 3 star anise pods; about a teaspoon of cloves; and an onion cut in quarters. I simmered this for about 25 minutes and then strained it. I added the juice of one Meyer lemon, because I had some around that I had brought home from Berkeley. Important note: At this point, the broth should taste too strong -- after all, its flavor is going to be diluted by all the other things that go into the bowl.

My shopping list for ingredients that went into the pho:

Thin rice noodles
Broccoli
Carrots
Onion
Cabbage
Seasoned crispy tofu
Peanuts
Cilantro
Fresh basil
Big crunchy bean sprouts
Lime
Plum sauce
Chili-garlic sauce

The peanuts and cilantro (chopped), basil (torn), and bean sprouts go on top of the soup right before it is served, along with a good squeeze of lime juice. Plum sauce and chili sauce are added at the table. The rest goes into the bowl before you pour the hot broth over. I think it is nice to lightly steam the broccoli and carrots, and then to toss the onion and tofu into the steamer for just a few seconds to warm them through. The heat of the broth will cook the cabbage plenty.

Important note #2: One of the things that was sub-optimal last time was my failure to arrange things so that the assembled pho was sufficiently hot. The noodles get cooked by a soak in hot water, and are then rinsed in cold water--I think it is nice to use lukewarm water at the end, so there is nothing too cold to make your soup tepid. Similarly, it makes sense to steam the vegetables only after you have already brought your broth up to a simmer, so they don't get cold while you do other things.

About streamlining the process: Because we went out directly after dinner last night, the kitchen is now a wreck. Making pho is not a tidy and contained process, though the cleanup is actually fairly un-onerous: there's nothing sticky or baked-on or otherwise tenacious. And though the ingredient list is long, and you have to interact with a lot of different parts to the recipe, it's all pretty straightforward, as long as you take care of the broth ahead of time. In fact, you can do almost everything ahead of time, which would make this a fine party food, and also allow you to avoid the kitchen explosion effect. I think I will try to enact this strategy more fully the next time I make it.

Gnocchi with kale, garlic, and cream

The other day, we picked up a nice package of vacuum-packed gnocchi at the nice Italian shop in Dupont Circle. They were excellent, both light and toothsome, labeled "Emilia Brand." I make lots of things from scratch, but never, ever gnocchi. It daunts me. So it was a pleasant treat to have the opportunity to be able to make a gnocchi dish at home. We were both eager to try something that combined the gnocchi with pungent greens, of which we had some on hand, and it did turn out to be a great combination. Here's what I did:

First I took a bunch of red kale and trimmed it. Then I braised it with about a tablespoon of leftover oniony olive oil, about 1/2 cup water, 3 large cloves of sliced garlic, and some salt, over medium-low heat for about 25 minutes, until it was limp and glossy. I drained the kale, let it cool, and then chopped it roughly. Unlike spinach, kale doesn't give off a lot of liquid and thus doesn't lose too much volume. But still, it does shrink to about a third of its original fluffy size.

Meanwhile, I preheated the oven to 400° F.* and put a pot of salted water on to boil. The kale went back in my heavy Le Crueset pot (you could use any gratin) along with 3/4 cup half and half, some salt, and some nutmeg. I cooked the gnocchi in batches of about a quarter of a pound: drop em in, wait till they float, count ten, scoop em out with a slotted spoon. They got nestled into the kale and gently turned with a silicon spatula to mix. The kale dyed the garlic, the sauce, and the gnocchi various lovely shades of magenta.

Finally, I dotted the top with butter, sprinkled over a generous dusting of freshly grated parmesan, and popped it in the oven for about 15 minutes. Oh my, was it good. If we'd had bread and salad, what I made would have easily served 4, but I hadn't provided anything else, so between us we ate the whole thing.

The idea of baking the gnocchi in this way came primarily from Deborah Madison, in the ubiquitous Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. It is a Good Idea. However, you should be smarter than me and make sure to butter your gratin thoroughly before you add the gnocchi or anything else.

* At last I purchased an oven thermometer and discovered: Not only does our oven run between 50 and 100 degrees cool, it takes a really, really, REALLY long time to heat up. After 20 minutes set to 400 degrees, the thermometer read 275. After a mere 25 minutes, however, it was up to 300. Is there a leak somewhere? It is a holy mystery. No wonder I hate baking bread in there, though -- it just won't be possible to get things really truly hot in there. Translations so far:

to get 300, set to 400
to get 400, set to 450


When I've compiled a comprehensive list, I will write it up nicely and post it above the stove. Stupid stove.

A lazy dinner for feeble people

Tonight I am enfeebled by an incipient cold, so S. and I made dinner together (and he cleaned the kitchen, wonderful boy that he is). At first we considered frittata, but then we realized we had eaten eggs for brunch. Next we decided on a baked pasta with pink sauce, but it suddenly seemed like way too much work. Finally I proposed the following simple alternative, which we executed very nicely.

Boil spaghetti in a big pot of well-salted water. About one minute before the pasta is ready, throw in a couple of hands full of the mixed baby greens we had hanging around waiting to be made into salad. Drain all together and toss with the yummy artichoke spread we got a while back, and add two minced cloved of garlic (yes, raw!) some freshly ground black pepper and freshly grated parmesean cheese. It is comfortably unchallenging but not at all boring, just the order of the day.

Also, it is cold here! Ay yi yi. Later I will report on my Berkeley food adventures and some nice cold-weather drinks.

Alchemical pasta with eggplant and ricotta

What was supposed to be a day filled with lovely, productive work work working was instead filled, for the most part, with migraines, befuddled druggedness, and Persons from Porlock. But now that the narcotic haze has lifted, I'm hungry! There will be no more working here until I've filled my poor scholar's belly, and that's flat.

Fortunately, we've been quite ambitious in our grocery shopping of late, which means I've got plenty of gourmet odds and ends to work with. So, while replenishing my fluids with plenty of elderflower saft, I've thrown together a nice and totally unreproducable variation on the perennial eggplant-and-pasta combination. What follows is in no way a recipe, merely a report of what went in.

There's something so pleasurable about mixing together the contents of many little jars and stepping back to see what happens. It reminds me of a very wonderful "cookbook" I owned when I was a wee lassie, of recipes along the lines of mud pies, raised to an art form. I remember only that the final recipe (featuring dandelion fluff, I think) recommended that it be consumed with Mumm's, not stooping to mention even that Mumm's was champagne. That should give you an idea of the tone. I miss that book terribly, and wish I could remember anything more about it, such as, say, the title.

Anyway, in the interests of documenting all, here (in my best approximation) are the components:

1. 1 medium eggplant, cut into 1" cubes, baked until tender, and chopped roughly
2. 1 lb. rombi (little ruffled parallelograms of pasta), cooked to an al dente state in heavily salted water.
3. 1/2 tub of organic ricotta cheese
4. 3 fat cloves of garlic, chopped fine
5. A couple of tablespoons of ultra-fancy tomato paste
6. A tablespoon or two of artichoke spread
7. About a tablespoon of roasted red pepper dip
8. A splash of olive oil
9. A few handsful of baby spinach (raw)
10. Lots of freshly ground pepper
11. Grated odds and ends of cheese


Items 1 and 3-8 were mixed separately into a kind of sauce. I tossed the pasta in the sauce and then tossed in the spinach, which would cook just fine when I put the whole thing in to bake. I layered the pasta mixture and the cheese in a deep round baking dish, adding extra spinach where it seemed appropriate, and plenty of pepper along the way. The results, so delicious, will never be heard of again.