Spaghetti alla puttanesca

As the sibling of a picky eater, I want to acknowledge something.  I know that there are people in this world who screw up their faces at the sight of a garlic clove, whose eyes well up with just a whiff of pepper.  There are people who quake in their boots at the mere mention of olives, for whom anchovies are the height of terror.  There are people who demand that food be mild-mannered, lightly seasoned, inoffensive.  I know and love a number of these people.  I pass absolutely no judgment on their eating habits.

If you are one of these people, this is not the recipe for you.  Turn back now.  Here be dragons.

Now that that's out of the way: spaghetti alla puttanesca.  This is a classic Italian sauce, rumored to have been developed in the brothels of southern Italy.  (Wikipedia tells me the literal translation is "whore's spaghetti.")  It's possibly my favorite tomato-based sauce ever--aggressive and entirely unapologetic, with a bracing balance of salt, heat, and vinegar-tang.  There are surely thousands upon thousands of puttanesca recipes in existence; this is mine.

Butternut Squash Ravioli in Maple-Cream Sauce

I went to the wedding of Emily's cousin a few weeks ago, and for my main course at the reception I opted for the vegetarian dish: butternut squash ravioli. While I quite enjoy butternut squash -- it's among the many things I look forward to in fall -- the idea of stuffing it into a ravioli pouch never really occurred to me. As it turned out, my dinner was quite delicious and so, naturally, as soon as I returned home I decided to try my hand at this pasta-making business.

This particular recipe is adapted from a recipe I found on the Poor Girl Gourmet. I didn't change much, but I figure that I can be a bit more concise in my instructions than the author is. Also my pasta-making technique is better, in my opinion. After all, I have experience with this sort of thing.

 

Aunt Ruthie's summer pasta with tomatoes, mozzarella and basil

This week's entry is a bit different from last week's Ribfest meat extravaganza. Three weeks ago when the summer was in its final and most pleasant stages, I (Pat) took advantage of a pot-luck picnic and the cheap bulk tomatoes bursting off the vines to make a big batch of another one of our favourite foods in the world: summer pasta with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella and basil.

This was the dish that turned me from a tomato-hater into a tomato-fiend a few years ago, thanks to my Aunt Ruthie's recipe and her fresh homegrown tomatoes. It has one of the highest deliciousness:preparation-time ratios I know of, and is the kind of vegetarian dish that has just as intense flavours and textures as any meat dish.

I've provided a sort of recipe as best I can remember, but it's more like rules of thumb to apply to your proportions. The photo shows all the ingredients I used to make a giant batch that supplied the pot-luck as well as several lunches/dinners for a couple of days (although, unfortunately, it's not quite the same as left-overs and doesn't keep more than a couple of days). 

Grown-up macaroni and cheese

As promised, Sawa decided to attempt to make mac n' cheese from scratch after our mac-n'-cheese-in-a-box last week. The recipe is on p. 93 of Anne Willan's "The Good Cook", which as I've noted previously, is one of our major sources of inspiration for recipes and general cooking concepts.

Basically, the main difference between this and the boxed kind that we made last week is that you make the cheese sauce yourself, whisking together flour, butter, milk, grated cheddar cheese and nutmeg on the stove. Also, rather than just pouring it over the boiled macaroni, you bake the whole thing in a casserole dish for half an hour.

It's hard to say exactly how we feel about the finished product. True, it was very tasty, but it was almost nothing like the nostalgic mac n' cheese of our youth, either in taste or in ease of preparation. If you think of it as a completely un-related food group, it'll probably be less jarring.

Here are some action shots of the cooking process:

World's Best Lasagna -- Seriously.

I love lasagna. I used to hate it, because I used to hate mixing foods. I was one of those people who refused to have her foods touching on the plate. But the first time I had lasagna (I think it was my freshman year at Amherst), it was love at first bite. Since then, I have been on the hunt for the perfect lasagna bolognese. I was pretty sure that Pasta E Basta had perfected the recipe - until I tried this.

The first time I had this dish was this past summer with several of my Amherst friends under the direction of recent alum Jordan Gilbertson '10. I made it alone for the first time for my parents and sister, and made it a third time this past weekend for a big family event. Some of the responses included:

"This is UNBELIEVABLE."

"I consider myself a lasagna aficionado, and this is seriously the best lasagna I've ever tasted."

"What did you put in this?! It's amazing!"

"I can honestly say this is the best birthday dish I have ever had." (The Guest of Honor)

"Can you pack some of this up for me to have a 2AM?" (My cousin, a cop on the Friday night shift)

Good cooking tunes - very important!

Have I built this lasagna up enough for you yet? Good. Because it is definitely time consuming, but it is also COMPLETELY worth it. And, best of all, the leftovers taste just as good (maybe even better!) for the next few days.  The original recipe is from allrecipes.com, but there are a couple tweaks I've made that I think make a serious difference, so I'm posting my version. Enjoy with a Caesar salad, garlic bread, and a nice red wine (or all by itself, since it's so hearty ... except, don't skip the wine). Hope you love it!

Mantı: how the Turks do meat dumplings

I'm seeing an alarming lack of good ol' fashioned MEAT dishes on this blog. Also, I promised in my first post that you would see some authentic Turkish dishes from me, so here you go.

Mantı ("dumpling"), pronounced MAHN (as in
"Ma" and "Pa") tooh (as in "woof"), can be found all over central Asia and even into the former Soviet bloc and Northwest China. As might be expected, it is a touchstone of classical Turkish cooking. However, it's not the sort of dish you will find readily in the restaurants of Ankara or Istanbul. That's because mantı, despite being a relatively straightforward food to make, tends to be rather time-consuming and labor-intensive if you want to do it right. The only occasion that I ever had the pleasure to sample this dish in all its home-cooked glory was when one of my Turkish co-workers invited me and some other American teachers into her Ankara apartment for a traditional Turkish dinner.

When you think of mantı, you should picture an assembly line consisting of a Turkish mother and her daughters (and in some cases, her sons) in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, laughing and gossiping and talking about the events of the week as they patiently knead the lumps out of the homemade dough, pound out and roll the pasta into thin sheets, and assemble the dumpling pouches with precision and dexterity. For many Turks, the dish is just as much a socio-familial institution as it is a culinary one; that's half the fun of preparing it. It's very much akin to baking a cake/pie or grilling steaks in American culture -- the sort of thing you do with family and friends on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Perhaps the best thing about this dish is how much mileage you can get out of the leftovers. While assembling the mantı is time-consuming, cooking them is not: like any pasta, all you need is to boil some water and prepare a quick sauce. Many Turkish families will spend their Sundays preparing a week's batch of dumplings, storing them in the fridge or freezer to be served on those nights of the week when no one has the energy to cook anything else. I suggest that you do the same -- if your family doesn't gobble them all up like mine did!

So without further ado, here is my personal recipe for mantı, collated from the tips and tricks of my Turkish co-workers and prepared -- in the spirit of the dish -- with the company of my mother.