Linguine with Spinach, Olive Oil, and Garlic

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Here’s an ingenious pasta creation: fresh spinach cooked in an aglie e olio technique and tossed with freshly cooked linguine and grated Pecorino Romano cheese; all finished with a broiled breadcrumb topping. I came across the recipe in my copy of the old Union Square Café Cookbook, liked it immediately, and made it for dinner the very next day.

BTW, this cookbook is very readable. Danny Meyer’s warm personal voice, Michael Romano’s Italian family traditions, the precise instructions, the strong support for fresh produce from the nearby Union Square Greenmarket, and my own recollections of the great restaurant in its original Greenwich Village location (mere blocks from my home) make it still a star of my cookbook collection.

I easily assembled the ingredients for the dish. The only thing I had to buy was spinach – not local, at this time of year, alas.
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Without the resources of a restaurant to draw on, I found the recipe somewhat more complicated than the simple dish of pasta aglie e olio I usually make, but it could be prepared in stages until almost the very end. Stage One was to assemble the topping. In a little dish I stirred together plain dry breadcrumbs, grated pecorino, chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and olive oil.
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Stage Two was to prepare the spinach, starting by rinsing, drying, and chopping it. I slivered three garlic cloves and simmered them over very low heat in three tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil.
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When they had turned a very light golden color, I scooped them out of the pan, sprinkled in half a teaspoon of dried red pepper flakes, and began adding the spinach.
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I tossed and stirred the spinach in the flavored oil until it was limp, then turned off the heat and let it rest. As always, the spinach was vastly reduced in volume.
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Having prepared both spinach and crumb topping in advance, I had no more to do until dinnertime. Then, things had to start moving faster.

I boiled the linguine as usual. Just before draining it, I had to scoop out half a cup of its water, stir it into the spinach, and turn the heat back on under its pan. Then I dumped the drained pasta on top of the spinach and instantly sprinkled on two tablespoons of grated pecorino. (I’m not sure why the bare pasta needed to get the cheese so quickly, but that’s what the recipe wanted.)
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Then I had to mix the pasta thoroughly with the spinach, transfer the entire contents of the pan to a gratin dish, spread on the topping, put the dish under a preheated broiler just long enough to brown the breadcrumbs – about two minutes – and “serve immediately.”

I did all that as quickly as I could, but without the speed and discipline of professional kitchen work, my linguine was no longer piping hot by the time it made it to our plates.
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Even so, it was an excellent dish. The spinach was tender and flavorful, the garlic subdued but pervasive. The breadcrumbs provided a tiny crunch, the grated cheese a slight savory undertone, the red pepper flakes a hint of piquancy. The fruity olive oil combined all the other flavors into a luscious dressing for my good imported linguine.

With all due respect to Danny and Michael, however, I might try a few tiny changes the next time I make this dish:

• Add a little salt to the final mixture (there was none at all but a speck in the crumb topping and a spoonful in the pasta water)
• Heat the pan longer on the stove before the transfer to the broiler (maybe draining the pasta a bit sooner, so it finishes its cooking in the pan)
• Just for good measure, go a bit heavier on the extra virgin olive oil.

Finally, I will say that, just as it was, the small amount of the pasta that we couldn’t finish made a very nice little frittata for a first course at dinner the next evening.

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Seven-P Pasta

No, it’s not a dish made with seven green peas. It’s a dish whose seven main ingredients have names in Italian that start with P. In English, only five are Ps – though I snuck two additional Ps into my dish at the end. It makes a fairly quick, light pasta sauce, nice for warm weather, with what for me is an unusual combination of ingredients. Here they are, in quantities for two portions, downsized from a recipe for six.
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I found the recipe in The Italian Vegetable Book by Michele Scicolone, who tells us she was given it by the cook of the Selvapiana winery in Tuscany while on a visit there. My oenophiliac spouse, who has also visited Selvapiana, thinks very highly of its wines, so he encouraged me to try the dish and, from his wine closet shelves, produced one of its bottles for us to drink with it.
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In a skillet with a little olive oil, I began by gently cooking the first three Ps – pancetta (unsmoked bacon), porro (leek), and peperoncino (crushed red pepper) – until the leek was softened.
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Next, I stirred in the fourth P, the pomodoro: a ripe heirloom tomato that I’d halved and rubbed, cut side down, against a box grater to quickly chop the flesh.
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As soon as the sauce thickened, I poured on the fifth P, panna – heavy cream – and stirred it in. The combination of tomato and cream was something I wasn’t familiar with in Tuscan dishes.
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This made quite a thick sauce already, and there were still two Ps to go. I set the pan aside while I cooked the pasta – the recipe’s requested penne – and saved some of the cooking water.

The seventh P, grated parmesan cheese, then went into the sauce, which really thickened it. I could see why I’d had to save the cooking water, and stirred in a good dose of it, along with all the pasta. Here you see the result, including my first extra English-language P – a little chopped fresh parsley, for a touch of color contrast.

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My second extra P doesn’t show in this photo of the plated pasta, because I didn’t think of it until after tasting the dish. It just cried out for a lashing of freshly ground black pepper.
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These simple ingredients made a very flavorful dish, its rusticity polished a bit by the cream. All in all, a happy combination. The 2004 Selvapiana Fornace that Tom opened was quite unusual and went very well with the dish. He’s done a post about it on his own wine blog.

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Pappardelle with Ricotta and Crushed Peas

I’ve just discovered an attractive new recipe for fresh egg pasta, unlike anything I’ve made before. That was surprise enough, given how many years I’ve been cooking pasta, but the dish has a number of virtues. It’s quick and easy, lush and creamy, lively and cheerful. Quite pretty too, with a springlike light green sauce.

The recipe, called Fettuccine with Ricotta and Crushed Peas, is from The Italian Vegetable Book, by Michele Scicolone. Written to serve eight, the recipe was easy to scale down. I had no fettuccine on hand, so I substituted pappardelle, wider strips of egg pasta: four ounces for two first-course portions. The other ingredients were ¼ cup of fresh ricotta, ¼ cup of green peas, ¼ cup of grated Parmigiano, and 2 tablespoons of chopped scallion.
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The recipe actually specifies frozen peas – nice for when it’s not fresh pea season, though I imagine fresh ones would work just as well. I boiled these small, sweet imported Italian peas for just one minute.
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I scooped them out of the water (which I saved for cooking the pasta), patted them dry, and put them in my mini food processor, along with the scallions.
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The little machine doesn’t have enough power to fully puree the peas, but it crushed them thoroughly enough. Next I added the ricotta, salt, and pepper.
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The combination whipped into a thick, nubbly cream. That was the sauce.
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When we were ready to eat, I brought the pot of water back to a boil and cooked the pappardelle. Saving a little of the water in case it was needed to thin the sauce, I drained the pasta, quickly returned it to the empty pot, and stirred in all the sauce. It did need a bit of extra water to coat the pappardelle smoothly.
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I divided the pasta between two warmed bowls and topped each with the grated Parmigiano and freshly ground black pepper. Delicious!
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Pasta with Asparagus, Ham, and Cream

Though spring is inexorably yielding to summer, local asparagus is still available at the farmstands of my Greenmarket, and Tom and I are still happily consuming it. There’s often a bouquet of asparagus spears in a glass in my refrigerator, like a vase of flowers in bud – which, of course, is exactly what they are.

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I took some of my latest bunch to use in a pasta dish: Maccheroncini alla Saffi, from Marcella Hazan’s More Classic Italian Cooking. It’s a book I’ve had and enjoyed for decades, but I couldn’t remember ever making this recipe for small macaroni with asparagus, ham, and cream. The combination seemed classic, almost familiar: Surely I’ve eaten something like this before. Well, let’s see how this particular version comes out.

Scaling it down for two servings, I started by boiling half a pound of asparagus spears until just tender.
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When they were done and drained, I cut them into short lengths, cut two ounces of boiled ham into small strips, and measured out half a cup of heavy cream. Those were essentially all that was needed for the sauce, which was to come together while the pasta was cooking. So I set them aside until dinner time approached.

Then I dropped six ounces of penne into boiling salted water, melted a tablespoon of butter in the asparagus’s cooking pan, put in the asparagus pieces just long enough to turn them in the butter, added the ham, stirred in the cream, and cooked for about a minute. When the penne were al dente, I drained them and tossed them in the pan with the sauce, off heat.
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For our individual servings we showered on lots of freshly grated parmigiano and freshly ground black pepper. Between the cheese and the ham, no additional salt was needed.
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It was an attractive dish, and pleasant enough to eat. But mildly disappointing. While the asparagus, the ham, the cheese, the cream, and the pasta were all good tastes in themselves, they didn’t do anything for each other: not in the pan, not in the bowl, and not on the palate. A synthesis of flavors in a dish is important to me; if the whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts, I can’t fall in love with a recipe.

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Gnocchi with Lamb and Pepper Ragù

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This dish of potato gnocchi with a long-cooked sauce of lamb and sweet red peppers – from my book The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen – has two unusual features: the cut of lamb it used and the way the gnocchi were cooked.

Let’s start with the meat. Its source was the trimmings from a frenched rack of lamb. I always ask for them when the butcher prepares a rack for me. Lambs are running very large these days, so the trimmings from this latest rack came to 1-3/4 pounds.
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Separating bits of meat from those gnarly hunks of fat, fell, and connective tissue is a maddeningly long task, which Tom generously undertakes for me. (He modestly suggests not trying it unless you have the patience of a saint and the knife skills of a samurai.) This time it produced 10 ounces of pure meat.
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You don’t need to go through that much effort for the dish, however. Half-inch pieces of any cut of lamb will do. Salted and peppered, they go into a heavy casserole to be browned in olive oil with two cloves of garlic, two bay leaves, and an optional little peperoncino (dried hot red pepper).
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Once my lamb was browned, I poured in ¼ cup of white wine and cooked until it evaporated. Then it was time to remove the peperoncino and stir in four chopped plum tomatoes – I used canned this time, but fresh are fine too – and two Bell peppers – preferably red, for their sweetness – cut into narrow two-inch strips.
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I covered the casserole and let it simmer gently for two hours, stirring occasionally and checking that the juices weren’t drying up. If they are, adding a little water will keep the solids from frying. The tomatoes dissolve into a sauce, and the peppers become meltingly tender.
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So that was the sauce. And here’s the second unusual feature I promised. The gnocchi I used are cooked right in the sauce – no separate boiling.

When I first saw this imported Italian brand in a store, I was extremely skeptical of its instructions. I’ve made potato gnocchi from scratch for years, and I’d never seen a recipe where they didn’t have to be cooked first in water. That would be like dropping raw spaghetti right into their pot of sauce. But I tried a box of them and cooked them as directed, and it worked! These Mama Emma gnocchi are so good and so easy to work with, I’ve become a fan.

All you do is add a little extra water to your finished sauce – in this case, about half a cup for nine ounces of gnocchi – stir in the little nuggets, and cook until they’re tender, less than five minutes.
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They don’t swell very much (must be partially precooked?), but their final texture is just what it should be. In the long-simmered sauce, the flavors of lamb, tomato, and pepper mellow into an intriguing blend, with just a touch of spice from the peperoncino. A very satisfying down-in-the-country-tasting dish.
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Spaghetti with Fried Eggs and Roasted Peppers

The unusual trio of ingredients in the title of this Neapolitan dish was what drew my attention to it. I’d never encountered that combination, either in Italy or in cookbooks. The recipe, from Arthur Schwartz’s Naples at Table: Cooking in Campania, is credited to the owner of an agritourism farm near Paestum. A sensational creation, Schwartz calls the dish – always a huge success. While I tend to look with suspicion on such extremes of praise, I thought it might be worth a try.

The entire vegetable component can be prepared several hours in advance. I roasted a big red Bell pepper, peeled it, cleaned it, and cut it in quarter-inch strips. They went into a small baking dish along with half a tablespoon of capers, a minced garlic clove, a handful of chopped parsley, salt, and pepper.
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While the pasta water was coming to a boil, I sprinkled bread crumbs over the pepper dish, drizzled on a tablespoon of olive oil, and put it in a 350° oven for ten minutes. It came out looking and smelling good enough to eat, all by itself. Peppers are a wonderful vegetable.
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When the pasta (for half a recipe, I used six ounces of linguine) was nearly done, I fried a jumbo egg in olive oil, keeping it sunny side up, until the white was set. I put the drained pasta into a serving bowl and topped it with the peppers, the egg, and its frying oil.
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For tossing the mixture, the recipe says to break the egg white into pieces and let the yolk spread over the pasta, where it will become a sauce, cooking further from the heat.

Well, that didn’t exactly work for me. The yolk sank right in to the mixture, where it nearly solidified before there was a chance for it to coat the pasta. That made the dish too dry. It needed lacing with additional olive oil.
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The main problem, though was that the three main components didn’t do a thing for each other. The pasta hadn’t taken on any flavor from the peppers, the egg white was a bland nonentity, and the bits of coagulated yolk were blobs in our individual bowls. Nothing tasted bad, but this “sensational creation” just didn’t come together into a harmonious whole.

It might have been a much better dish if I’d done it differently: sautéed the peppers and their seasonings; finished the cooked pasta in the sauté pan long enough for it to absorb those flavors; and off heat, briskly stirred in a beaten raw egg, to thicken gently around the other ingredients in a silky coating, in the manner of making spaghetti carbonara. I might try that one day.

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Pasta with Chickpeas

In my ongoing quest to discover good new-to-me recipes among cookbooks in my current collection, I just made a three-base hit from one of my oldest volumes: The Tuscan Cookbook by Wilma Pezzini, published in 1978.

Pezzini, a Polish woman married to an Italian doctor and living in a small town in Tuscany, was neither a professional writer nor a professional cook. This, her only book, is a personal compendium of “the everyday dishes eaten in Tuscany today, with a few comments on where they come from, how they became the way they are, and anything else I thought might be of interest.”

The three recipes I’ve just made from the book span the principal parts of an Italian meal: a first-course primo, a main-course secondo, and a dessert, a dolce. I’m going to give each of them its own post, starting today with the primo, pasta with chickpeas.

To make half a recipe’s worth, I soaked four ounces of dried chickpeas overnight. The recipe calls for a 24-hour soak, with baking soda to help soften them, but I knew my chickpeas were reasonably fresh and didn’t need that much time. The next morning, I drained the chickpeas and put them in a pot with a quart of cold water, a sprig of rosemary, and a tiny clove of garlic.
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The covered pot cooked gently for two hours. Toward the end of the time, I chopped an ounce of bacon and a good chunk of a Spanish onion, and softened them in olive oil in a sauté pan.
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After dissolving half a teaspoon of tomato paste in half a cup of homemade broth (rather than the recipe’s bouillon cube) and stirring that into the onion and bacon, I set a food mill over the pan and milled in half the chickpeas.
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Next, in went the whole chickpeas, their remaining cooking water, salt, and enough more water to keep the mixture loose.
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Finally, it was time for the pasta. The recipe calls for “non-egg noodles,” which offers a lot of leeway. I decided to use four ounces of miscela – a mixture of odds and ends of left-over pastas and broken pieces. In Italy, those used to be kept on hand, often for use in soups, so nothing would be wasted. I have a big jar of it in the pantry, originally filled with a purchased bag of miscela, which I keep refreshed with broken-up bits and remnants of other pastas.
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When I added the pasta to the chickpeas, I realized it would have been wiser to start the bacon and onion in a deep saucepan. My sauté pan was so broad and shallow that I could add more water only in small amounts and had to stir almost constantly to prevent the pasta from sticking to the pan.
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Well, I’ll know better next time. It wasn’t a big problem, though – just kept me busier at the stove than I’d have needed to be. And the result was well worth the effort. At the dinner table, we completed our bowls of pasta e ceci to our individual taste with extra-virgin olive oil, freshly ground black pepper, crushed red pepper, and grated parmigiano.
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Before this, I would have said my own version of pasta with chickpeas, from my book The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen, was the absolute best. Now that dish (which I’ve also written about here) will have to share the palm with this one: it’s different from mine, but equally delicious.

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Neapolitan Pasta and Beans

Pasta e fagioli is Italian soul food. This quintessential peasant dish has an endless number of regional, local, and individual variations, each fiercely defended by its partisans as the absolute best. Those of us not invested in a particular version have the pleasure of enjoying them all.

When Tom and I did our first cookbook, La Tavola Italiana, we took advantage of that abundance and developed three pasta e fagioli recipes of our own, one each in the styles we’d had in northern, central, and southern Italy:

• Venetian: fresh egg pasta, pinto beans, and a big pork bone
• Roman: short tubular pasta, white beans, tomato sauce, and pork skin
• Neapolitan: mixed short pasta shapes, red beans, fresh tomatoes, no meat

This week I made a modest quantity of the southern version’s recipe for us two. Overnight, I soaked four ounces of Rio Zape beans, a very tasty heirloom variety that I buy online from Rancho Gordo.
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Next day I drained them, added 1½ cups of fresh water, and set them on to simmer while I peeled, seeded, and chopped 2 big plum tomatoes, peeled and halved a garlic clove, chose a tiny dried hot red pepper, and measured out ¼ teaspoon of dried oregano.
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I sautéed those ingredients in olive oil, with salt and black pepper, for ten minutes
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then stirred the seasonings into the bean pot and let it go on simmering until the beans were tender. They took only about an hour, indicating that they were a very fresh batch. They also produced a rich, meaty aroma, for all that there wasn’t a speck of meat in with them. Off heat, the pot sat at the back of the stove all afternoon. (No point showing you a picture of that: the beans were all sunken under the liquid.)

As dinner time approached, I brought the pot to a boil and stirred in four ounces of miscela pasta – short pieces of many different shapes of dried pasta. In the old days, Neapolitan families kept all their broken and leftover bits of pasta – the miscela – for just these purposes. Nowadays we can buy such a mix.
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Slowly, the pasta pieces absorbed the liquid, swelled up, and began rising to visibility.
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This part of the cooking always needs frequent stirring, because beans and pasta both tend to stick to the bottom of the pot as the liquid is absorbed. In this case they also needed a little additional hot water to keep the sauce from over-thickening. You can make the dish as moist or dry as you choose: Tom likes it soupier than I do, so we negotiate the difference each time.
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Once the pasta is done, the pot needs to sit off heat, covered, for five minutes before serving. Then, at table, diners complete the dish to their taste with olive oil, salt, crushed red pepper, and grated pecorino Romano cheese.
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If you’ve never tasted it, you’ll hardly believe how rich and luscious a concoction these humble ingredients make. In Tom’s Neapolitan family, his father’s generation – 16 siblings – grew up on past’e fagiol’ and revered it all their lives.

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An Italian Summer Dinner from TSOTIK

Planning for a casual dinner party last week, I turned to the summer section of TSOTIK (rhymes with exotic), our family name for Tom’s and my book The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen. There I found recipes for several perfect-for-hot-weather dishes that I hadn’t made in a long time, so I built the evening’s menu around them.

 

Insalata Caprese – Zucchini a Scapece

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Insalata caprese hardly needs a recipe at all: just pair the best available mozzarella with the best available tomatoes, and offer salt, pepper, and olive oil for diners to dress their own portions. The great white puffball you see above is a very fresh 1½-pound buffalo milk mozzarella, and the red cartwheels around it are local heirloom tomatoes. The combination is always wonderful.

Zucchini a scapece is a classic Neapolitan antipasto that I’ve written about before. For it I lightly floured rounds of zucchini, fried them in olive oil, and marinated them overnight in a simmered mixture of vinegar, water, garlic, and chopped mint leaves. The dish is best when made, as here, with the costata romanesco variety of zucchini, the prince of the summer squash family.

 

Fettuccine all’Abruzzese

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If you think this bowl of pasta looks as if there’s barely any sauce on it, you’re right. There isn’t much. But this simple peasant dish always surprises people by how unexpectedly delicious it is. The sauce is just a sauté of finely chopped pancetta and onion; chopped basil and parsley, salt, and pepper; with a little broth stirred in and nearly evaporated. The fettuccine – homemade, and rolled very thin: that’s essential – are tossed first with grated pecorino cheese and then with the sauce. The pasta readily absorbs the sauce, and the diners just as readily absorb the pasta.

 

Abbacchio in Umido – Ciambotta

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For the book I translated this meat recipe as “Summertime Lamb Stew” because, in Italian, in umido means stew, but there are no substantial vegetables in it, as there are in most cold-weather stews. It’s simply chunks of boneless lamb shoulder braised in tomato sauce, with seasonings of chopped pancetta, onion, carrot, celery, parsley, and marjoram. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get really young lamb these days, so the dish can take much longer to cook than the recipe suggests. Not a problem, though: just start early – even a day in advance – simmer however long it takes until the lamb is tender, and reheat it when needed. This is a reliable dish: It’ll be fine.

To accompany the vegetable-less lamb stew, I made a big sauté of summer vegetables from the greenmarket: eggplant, celery, onions, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, and zucchini. We also had plenty of crusty bread available to soak up the delicious juices they generated, along with the equally good sauce from the lamb.

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The dinner wasn’t confined to these three courses. We also had a few hors d’oeuvres before coming to table, a cheese platter after the lamb, and a simple dessert of homemade lemon ice with cookies. Altogether, a very relaxed and comfortable summer repast. And Tom had picked out five wines from his collection to match with the food. He has written about those wines on his own blog.

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Swimming in the Splendor of Venetian Seafood

During the week in Venice that Tom and I are just back from, we indulged in so much seafood that we could almost feel gills beginning to form on our necks. Most fish and shellfish from the Adriatic Sea and the Venetian lagoon are so unlike anything we get at home that every meal was an adventure. Here are highlights.

 

Antipasti at Giorgione

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Friends who live part of every year in Venice took us to this simple family-run trattoria in their neighborhood. We started with granseola, a kind of spider crab, and cicale di mare, mantis shrimp. Both were simply boiled, chilled, and dressed with olive oil and lemon. Neither flavor resembles those of our blue claw crabs or shrimps of any size, but both were delicious.
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Main courses at Al Covo

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This is a handsome, chef-owned, Slow Food member restaurant with a mission to “research, appreciate, defend and propose” the products of the territory around the Venetian lagoon. We ate there with our Venetian friends also, who patronize it often.
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My main course, above, was breaded and fried sarde “de alba” (“dawn” sardines: a name for fish caught first thing in the morning and cooked that same day) and canoce (another local name for mantis shrimp).
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These are the two halves of Tom’s main course, a fritto misto dell’Adriatico. It was served that way, in sequence, apparently so that none of the fried things would get cold. They were sole (smaller and sweeter than any variety we get here), anchovies, scallops, squid, shrimp, monkfish, polenta, and several vegetables. Enough food for a hungry boy scout troop..

 

Dinner at Ai Barbicani

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On our first visit to Venice, many years ago, we had two very pleasant dinners at this little restaurant in the city’s medieval section. We were delighted this year to find it still in business, warm, charming, and even better than we remembered. They presented us with welcoming glasses of Prosecco and good-night glasses of grappa.
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We each had this most unusual antipasto of marinated raw seafood. There were shrimps in raspberry sauce; anchovies in vinegar and currants; thin, thin strips of cuttlefish mantle, and nuggets of monkfish. Fascinating flavors and textures, very attractively presented.
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Then we had an extravaganza of mixed grilled seafood: There were two big sweet-fleshed scampi, two even bigger mazzancolle (king prawns), a large sole, a small salmon steak, and chunks of coda di rospo (the ubiquitous monkfish), all perfectly grilled and amazingly fresh and moist. Even the platter on which they were served was almost a work of art.
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Dinner at Osteria da Fiore

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This entire trip to Venice was a gift to ourselves for our 50th wedding anniversary, and on the day itself we dined luxuriously at this Michelin one-starred restaurant. It had what for us is an ideal combination of elegant French ambience and service with the best of lightly modernized traditional Venetian cooking. We adored it.

Our first courses were spaghetti with tartufi di mare (Venus clams) and agnolotti filled with fresh peas in a sauce of astice (spiny lobster) with fresh ginger – the latter a particularly intriguing exotic note.
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Small soft-shell crabs from the Venetian lagoon – moleche in Italian, moeche in Veneziano – are available only briefly in spring and fall. Delighted to find we were there just before the end of the season, we both chose them for our main course. Perfectly deep-fried, they were the best dish we ate in the entire trip.
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We also had our best wine of the trip at Fiore, which Tom talks about in his blog. All in all, a great celebratory trip and a wonderful meal for an important anniversary.

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