My "Go-To" Pasta Dish

I probably make orechiette with rapini and sausage more than any other pasta dish. This is an easy dish to make, which may be why I turn to it so frequently, but it also has a really nice balance of flavors. Another nice thing about this dish is that you can leave the meat out without losing too much flavor, making it a nice option for vegetarians.

You can make this dish with regular supermarket brocolli, and it is quite good, but I prefer the more bitter rapini, or broccoli raab. This is a classic dish that appears on numerous restaurant menus and on this blog here and here. Because I make this dish so frequently, I have had the chance to tweak the recipe several times. The main difference between this dish and the last version that I posted is the addition of oven roasted tomatoes. In my opinion, the "brightness" and acidity of the tomatoes is a welcome addition to this dish. I've made this iteration of the dish three or four times and am pretty pleased with it, so I thought I should include a step-by-step on how to make it.

First, we'll start with the necessary ingredients. This recipe makes two large servings or four to five servings if it is served as the pasta course for a multi-course meal. If you gather and prep your ingredients ahead of time, assembly is a snap.

You will need 2 cups of dried orechiette, 1/4 cup walnuts (toasted), 1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese, 3 cloves of roughly chopped garlic, 2-3 oven roast Roman tomatoes, 1/2-3/4 bunch of rapini, 1 Italian sausage, 1-2 anchovy fillets, olive oil, and red wine or balsamic vinegar. You may also add 1/2 to 1 tsp of red pepper flakes if you want to add a little heat.

Start by bringing a pot of water to a rapid boil. Salt the water and blanche the rapini for a little over a minute.

Remove the rapini and rinse under cold water. Set the rapini aside and let it drain in a collander. Bring the water back to a boil and add the pasta (you can add a little oil to the water to reduce foaming in the pasta water). The pasta will be done in about 10 minutes, and you can use this time to finish the other ingredients. First, remove the sausage from the casing and break apart into small chunks.

Cook the sausage with 1 Tbsp of olive oil for 2 to 4 minutes over medium high heat. When the sausage has browned, drain on a paper towel, leaving the oil in the pan. Add the garlic, anchovy, and red pepper flakes to the pan and cook over medium until the garlic just begins to change color.

Once the garlic begins to turn golden brown, add the rapini and the oven roasted tomatoes. Before adding these ingredients, cut the rapini into 1 inch length, and cut the oven roasted tomato halves (you will have 4 to 6 of these halves) into quarters. (To make oven roasted tomatoes, just cut the roma tomatoes in half, length wise, toss with olive oil and salt, and roast in a 200F oven for about 8 hours).

Toss everything together and let the mixture cook for another couple minutes.

Next, you will need to add the walnuts. Make sure to toast the walnuts in a dry frying pan, toaster oven, or oven before using them. This brings out the flavor a bit. If you don't toast the walnuts, they can have a sort of stale flavor to them, so this step is key. Roughly chop the walnuts and then toss them in with everything else.

When the pasta is al dente, add it to the pan with all of the other ingredients along with 1/4 to 1/3 cup of the cooking water.

Toss everything together, then add the parmesan cheese, 1 Tbsp vinegar, and season with a pinch of freshly cracked black pepper.

Black spaghetti with shrimp, soppresata, and green chile pesto

You can find the recipe for this dish here. It's one of the signature dishes at Babbo. Ideally, I would have used the tastier, smaller rock shrimp that the recipe calls for, but they didn't have any at the fish market. You can get the squid ink pasta here. As I've mentioned in previous posts, they (Maestri Pastai) make the best pasta out there.

Handmade spaghetti with ramps

Signs of spring have finally begun to show up in the local grocery stores. The other week, I bought a bunch of English peas at the market, and yesterday, the market had a bunch of ramps.
Ramps with spaghetti is a pretty classic combination, and I think that they go especially well with fresh pasta.

RECIPE (2 servings):

1 cup flour

2 eggs

2 bunches of ramps (about 16)

1-2 strips bacon (optional)

salt

pepper

red pepper flakes

grated parmesan cheese

Form the flour into a mound and create a well in the middle. Add the eggs to the well along with a pinch of salt. You can also add some pepper at this stage if you like. Beat the eggs, slowly incorporating the flour. Knead the dough for about 5 to 10 minutes. Keep adding flour if the dough feels too wet. Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest for at least 30 minutes. After resting, roll out the pasta and cut it to the desired width.

While the pasta is resting, bring a large pot of water to boil and add a generous amount of salt. Rinse the ramps thoroughly, and cut them in half crosswise to separate the leaves from the bulbs. Cut the root ends off of the bulbs and wipe off the outer layer of skin on the bulbs. When the water has reached a rapid boil, blanch the root ends until tender (about 4 to 5 minutes). Remove and place in an ice bath to stop the cooking, then let drain in a colander. Blanch the leaves for about 30 seconds, place in an ice bath and drain.

Meanwhile, cook the bacon. When the bacon is crisp, remove and drain on paper towels and then crumble into small bits. Remove any excess fat, leaving 1/2 to 1 tablespoon in the pan.

For the final step, you need to do a couple things really quickly. You don't want to over cook anything, so pay attention to timing here. Make sure the pasta is at a very rapid boil, and add the pasta. Next, add a pinch of red pepper flakes and saute for about 30 seconds over medium high heat. Add the ramps and the crumbled bacon, and saute over high heat for about two minutes, tossing frequently. After the pasta has been cooking for two to three minutes, it will be done. Reserve about 1 cup of pasta water, then add the cooked pasta to the saute pan, and toss thoroughly along with about 1/4 cup of grated parmesan cheese and pepper. Add a bit of pasta water if the mixture looks to dry, and keep tossing the mixture until everything is well incorporated. Serve immediately.

Sous-vide lamb loin with lamb jus, toasted orzo with sundried tomato and garlic confit, and broccoli raab with anchovies

This is my first foray into sous-vide cooking, and I am completely sold. I have never cooked something so perfectly. The difficulty with most cooking methods is that you are using a heat that is much higher than the temperature that you want to bring the meat up to. As a result, the outside of the meat may be a little too well done by the time the core reaches the desired internal temperature. With sous-vide, you get the water to the temperature you want to hit, throw the meat in a bag with some seasonings, aromatics, or a marinade, set it in the water and let it go. Since the temperature will never go above the desired internal temperature, you can forget about it for a while and not worry about overcooking. When you are ready to plate, remove the meat from the bag and give it a sear in a smoking hot pan. You want to use a super high heat so you can develop the Maillard reaction as quickly as possible. (The Maillard reaction occurs when you expose proteins to high heat. This is responsible for the nice crust associated with seared pieces of meat.) The end result is something that is cooked perfectly and consistently from the center to the very edge.

Here's the recipe for the meal that I made:

LAMB

-1 lamb loin

-6 cloves garlic confit*

-2 Tbsp chopped rosemary

-1 Tbsp thyme

-2 tsp lemon juice

-1/4 cup olive oil or canola oil

-salt, pepper

Blend together the garlic, rosemary, thyme, lemon juice, and oil. Season with salt and pepper. Cover the lamb loin with the marinade and let sit for a couple hours. Add the lamb to a plastic bag and vacuum out the air and place in a water bath set at 125 to 130 for rare or 130 to 135 for medium rare. If you like your meat well done, maybe you should rethink your preferences. The cooking time will vary depending on the thickness of the meat. I let my lamb loin sit in the water bath for about 2.5 hours.

LAMB JUS

-4 cups chicken stock

-lamb bones

-2 sprigs rosemary

-2 tsp sherry

-1.5 Tbsp red wine vinegar

-1 Tbsp sugar

-1 tsp salt

Try to buy the lamb loin on the bone so you can use the bones and scraps to make a lamb jus. Add the bones and scraps to the chicken stock and bring to a gentle simmer. After about an hour, add the rosemary sprigs. Lighly crush the rosemary with your knife handle to help release some of the oils. Turn the heat up a little bit and simmer for another 30 minutes. Remove the bones and rosemary and strain out any impurities. Add the remaining ingredients and then turn the heat up and reduce the mixture until it gets down to about 3/4 cup.

ORZO

-1 cup orzo

-2 cups chicken stock

-4 sundried tomatoes, diced

-6 cloves garlic confit

-1/4 cup white wine

-1 Tbsp olive oil

-chopped parsley

-salt, pepper.

Heat the oil in a saute pan. Add half the orzo and the garlic confit. Cook until the orzo begins to brown. Add the wine to stop the browning, and then add the rest of the orzo. Add the sundried tomatoes and begin adding the chicken stock a little bit at a time and stirring as if you are making risotto. Keep adding liquid and stirring until the orzo is just al dente. Remove from heat, stir in about a tablespoon of chopped parsley and season with salt and pepper. This dish is also good with pine nuts and artichoke hearts.

BROCCOLI RAAB

-1/2 bunch of broccoli raab

-2 anchovy fillets

-2 tsp olive oil

-1 tsp lemon juice

- clove garlic confit, smashed.

-pinch of red pepper flakes

-salt, pepper

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil and prepare an ice bath. Chop the broccoli raab to the desired size and add the thick stems to the pot. About 30 seconds to a minute later, add the rest of the broccoli and cook for another minute. Remove the broccoli to the ice bath to stop the cooking and set the color. Set aside in a strainer. Heat the oil in a saute pan over medium high heat. Add the smashed garlic confit, anchovies, and red pepper flakes and stir/smash everything together. Add the broccoli raab and cook, stirring frequently until the broccoli is cooked to your liking. Remove from heat, add the lemon juice, and season with salt and pepper.

*To make garlic confit, add peeled garlic cloves to a pot with enough olive oil to cover by about an inch. Heat up the oil enough so that small bubbles just begin to rise to the surface (about 180F to 200F). Let the garlic cloves cook for about 20 to 30 minutes. Turn the heat off and let everything cool down. The garlic confit should keep for about a month.

Fettuccine with Lemon

I had some pasta dough leftover from dinner last night, so, for lunch today, I made some fresh fettuccine and took another Batali recipe for a spin. This one, fettuccine with lemon, hot peppers and pecorino is really simple. Here's the recipe:

Fresh fettuccine (enough for two servings)
1 -1.5 lemons, zest and juice
1 jalapeno, seeded and cut into slivers
1/2 small to medium red onion, thinly sliced
1/4 to 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
2.5 to 3 T butter
1/4 to 1/2 C grated pecorino romano
1 T olive oil

Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a large saute pan.
Add the onions and red pepper flakes and cook until soft and translucent. Keep the heat low enough so they do not brown.
Add the jalapeno, cook for another minute.
Add the lemon zest and lemon juice. Cook for another minute.
Remove from heat, stir in butter and season with salt and pepper.
Cook pasta in a large pot of boiling, salted water for about 2 minutes.
Drain pasta and toss in with the sauce. Turn heat back on to medium, and toss in the grated cheese. Add a little bit of the pasta water if the lemon onion mixture needs to be thinned out. Serve the pasta after about a minute of letting everything cook together.

Mint love letters (Pasta stuffed with minted peas, merguez sausage and tomato sauce)

Last night Abby and I made "Mint Love Letters," which is one of the signature dishes at Babbo. It's a bit labor intensive since you have to make your own pasta, but the end result is well worth the effort. The peas, mint, and lamb complement each other beautifully. For the recipe, click through.

Orechiette, the sequel

I've already included a post on orrechiette with sausage and rapini, but I've changed my recipe a bit, so I thought an update would be in order. This is one of my favorite quick dishes; it has a really nice combination of bitterness from the broccoli raab, a savory note from the sausage, and hits of spiciness and sweetness from the red pepper and balsamic vinegar. I've spent a lot of time tweaking it and have landed on what I think is a pretty good recipe. The key to this dish is finding a really high quality pasta to start with. Maestri Pastai makes the best orechiette that I've been able to find, so I would recommend that brand. You can order it online here.

INGREDIENTS (2 servings)

• orrechiette
  
• 1 sweet italian sausage, removed from casing
• 1/2 bunch broccoli raab, thick stems removed and cut into bit sized pieces
• 1/2 small onion, small dice
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/8 to 1/4 cup almonds or walnuts, ground in a food processor or coffee grinder.
  
• 1/4 cup white wine
• 2 anchovies (optional)
• 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
• salt, pepper
• pecorino romano cheese
• high quality, sweet balsamic vinegar
• regular olive oil for cooking
  
• high quality, Tuscan olive oil for finishing
  

Prep all the ingredients and heat 1 T olive oil in a large saute pan over med-high heat. Break apart the sausage into small pieces and add to the pan. After about 1 minute, add the onions and garlic and cook until the onions become translucent. You don't want them to burn, so turn the heat down if you need to. At this time, you should add the pasta to a pot of heavily salted water. It should take about 10 to 12 minutes to cook. Next, add the brocolli raab. Once this starts to wilt, add the anchovies and break apart. These should dissolve fairly quickly. Add the wine and turn the heat down to medium after it has reduced a little. Add a bit of water from the boiling pasta and toss everything together. Throw in the red pepper flakes and the ground almonds or walnuts, toss again, and let everything simmer. At this point, add salt and pepper to taste.

Once the pasta is done, add it to the saute pan. Make sure to reserve some of the pasta water. The pasta should be pretty al dente and be able to withstand another minute or two of cooking while still keeping its bite. If the sauce is too thick, add a bit of pasta water to loosen it up. Letting everything cook together in the pan allows the pasta to absorb a lot of the flavor from the sauce. As the pasta is cooking in the saute pan, add freshly grated pecorino romano to taste.

Plate and garnish with extra grated cheese, balsamic vinegar, and Tuscan olive oil.

Mac & cheese with blue cheese and bacon

This is the third version of mac & cheese posted on this blog. The other two (a southwest jalapeno version and a manchego and Spanish chorizo version) are posted here. This time around, I used three cheeses: cheddar, gruyere, and Valdeon - a really strong Spanish blue cheese and some applewood smoked bacon from Savenor's.

To make the mac & cheese, start by boiling water and cooking the pasta. I used DeCecco cavatappi pasta for this batch. Cut the bacon into small strips and cook slowly in order to render out a lot of the fat. While the bacon is cooking, you can start the cheese sauce. The first step is to make a basic bechamel. Heat up about 2 cups of milk. In a separate saucepan, melt about 4Tbsp of butter and mix with about 3Tbsp flour. Cook, stirring frequently, for about 3 minutes until the roux just begins to color. Add the warm milk to the roux 1Tbsp at a time until you have added about 1/2 cup, then you can add larger amounts.
Let the bechamel simmer with a bay leaf for a about 10 minutes. You can add white pepper as well. Then, start stirring in grated or crumbled cheese. Add as much as you like. The more the better.
When the cheese sauce is done, add the bacon, mix in the pasta, and put everything into oven proof dishes.
Top with panko bread crumbs and finish in the oven for 30 minutes at 350F. To get the bread crumbs to brown a little better than in the picture below, you can put a couple pats of butter on top of the bread crumbs before putting it in the oven.

Spaghetti with Tuna Meatballs

Here's another recipe from the Dave Pasternak cookbook. Spaghetti with Tuna Meatballs. These meatballs would actually make great tuna patties for a sandwich, so I'll probably try that sometime soon. The basics of this are like any other meatballs, you just use tuna as the protein. Start by combining the tuna and breadcrumbs in a food processor. After pulsing this mixture a few times, stir in an egg, salt, pepper, garlic and chopped parsley. You want to cook the garlic in olive oil first. For ratios, you should use about 1.5lb tuna, 3/4 cup bread, 1 egg, and 2 cloves of garlic cooked in 2 Tbsp of oil.

Form into meatballs and cook in a little bit of olive oil.

Serve with spaghetti and basic tomato sauce.

Breaking in the new pasta maker

One of the great things about the KitchenAid stand mixer is that, in addition to allowing for hands-free mixing, there are all sorts of cool attachments that you could add on to it, like a pasta roller/cutter. I've tried making pasta before with just a rolling pin. This is much much much easier. It takes no time at all and tastes really good, so I have a feeling I'll be getting a lot of use out of it.

Here are step-by-step pictures of the proces.

Start by mixing together the flower and eggs. We also added a bunch of pepper for this batch.
Knead the dough for about 10 minutes and let rest for 30 minutes. Break the dough into a few pieces, flatten them, and feed them through the rollers, making the sheet progressively thinner.
Once you get to the desired thickness, cut the pasta.

Boil and finish cooking for another minute or two with the sauce.
Serve in a warmed bowl. I dressed this pasta with some lamb ragu that had been sitting in the freezer for a while. It's the same recipe that I made here, I just used lamb instead of pork....the lamb turned out a bit stringy, so I think I'll stick with pork next time I make this.

Curry noodles with beef

Over a year into the life of this blog, we finally have an entry from Abby. I didn't feel like cooking the other night, so Abby decided to try out a recipe for grilled beef with noodles in a Thai curry broth. Here are some pictures.

More home cookin' in the state of Washington

Abby, the Moys, and I were in town for a few days, so the reception dinner wasn't the only think I made. When it was just the Moys and Kinas, and not 100 guests, I was able to make a meal where I could focus on more than one dish. In addition to a simple grilled chicken, which I've made a few times this summer
I made a grilled corn salad with red onion, red bell peppers, mint, and lime
toasted orzo with artichoke hearts and almond slivers
and an appetizer of grilled toasts topped with a white bean and tuna bruscheta (I normally make this with anchovies).
For dessert, we had my mom's blackberry pie. We picked the blackberries for this from our front yard earlier that day.

Pasta Mia

There are two things you can be assured of when you go to Pasta Mia: long lines and large portions. Situated at the top of Adams Morgan's 18th St, Pasta Mia is a DC establishment that, for some odd reason, remains one of my favorite places to eat. I'm not sure why. Sure, the portions are big, but I don't have a huge appetite, so big portions have little value to me. The food itself is mediocre. I can, and often do, make much better pasta in my own kitchen. The house wine is terrible. And, while the food is cheap, you have to wait a long time for it, and I'm not sure that the time cost justifies going to Pasta Mia on economic grounds.
In spite of all of these short comings, I always find dining at Pasta Mia to be an extremely satisfying experience. For some reason, the bad table wine seems to go perfectly with the supersized dishes of pasta, checked tablecloths and cramped quarters.

Whenever Abby and I go here, we start with the prosciutto and mozzerella. This is one of our all time favorite appetizers and something that we often make at home.
After eating this, we order whatever pasta looks good. This time around, Abby ordered the papardelle bolognese and I had grilled chicken ravioli with a pink sauce.
Both dishes were good, but not great. Even so, I really liked them. A meal at Pasta Mia isn't about refined flavors or precise technique; it's about comfort.

Penne with rapini, anchovies, and bread crumbs

I was working late at the library tonight. Usually I would just get a burrito for dinner, but I had one for lunch and didn't feel like having a second one for dinner. I didn't have too much at home, but I figured I could, at the very least, whip up some sort of pasta dish. After a bit of foraging, I settled on rapini, a stale baguette, and anchovies as the main components for the dish.

Start by heating up a pot of water for the pasta, rinse the rapini and trim off the stems, mince two cloves of garlic, and chop up a few anchovies. To make bread crumbs, smash the stale bread into smaller pieces and transfer to a food processor to finish it off. Toast the bread crumbs in a pan with some olive oil and about 1/2 of the garlic.
When the water is boiling, salt the water and then drop the penne. Set a timer for 8 to 9 minutes. In a separate pan, cook the remaining garlic with the anchovies and some red pepper flakes in some olive oil.
Once the garlic gets to a golden brown color, add the rapini and toss. Add a splash of white wine to this mixture.
When the pasta is done, toss it in with the rapini mixture along with half of the bread crumbs and a grating of Parmessan or Pecorino.
Plate and top with more cheese, the remaining bread crumbs, a drizzle of high quality balsamic vinegar and olive oil (preferably Tuscan), and pepper. This all should take about 20 minutes max.

Fettucine with Corn, Crab, and Shrimp

When Abby and I went to Esca, we had this great dish of soft scrambled eggs with crab and corn. I really liked this combination, so I decided to see how it would work with pasta. It turns out that his combination works quite well, and it takes no time at all to make. Start by boiling water for the pasta. Add the corn to the boiling water and cook for about 5 minutes. Meanwhile, make a cream sauce in a separate pan with about 4-5 Tbsp butter, and equal amount of heavy cream, and about 1/4 cup of freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Keep this warm over low heat, stirring occasionally. When the corn is done, cut the kernels off of the cob and add to a pan with a tablespoon of butter. If you have some pancetta on hand, cut about 4 or 5 slices into thin strips and add this as well. After about a minute, add a handful of shrimp -I think I had about 8 shrimp - and then after another minute or two add about 1/4 cup of crab meat and season with salt and pepper. When you add the crab meat, drop the pasta (use about 3/4 lbs of fresh pasta here) and let it cook for one or two minutes, then add to the pan with the corn/shrimp crab mixture. Toss this with the cream sauce and then finish it off with lemon zest.