webcowgirl | Entries tagged with sicilian cooking

So ... with all of these trips to Italy, I've been cooking a lot more food from the region, thanks in part to some good cookbooks I've picked up. And along the way I've acquired some ideas about certain pastas liking to be served in certain ways. Trofie, for exampple (little strings with a knot tied in them is what they look like more or less), wants to be served with pesto and green beans. I don't know why, that's just the way I got it twice (Genoa and Milan), so that's how I think it needs to be served.

And bucatini, a hollow pasta. I think it wants to be served with Trapanese pesto, a mix of raw tomatoes and almonds. So I bought some, "fusilli lunghi bucatini," big curly hollow spaghettis, especially for this recipe, and, as they say, it was good.

However, there was some leftover in the bag, only enough for one serving, and not worth the effort of peeling tomatoes and using the mortar and pestle on the almonds, so I decided to try them in a carbonara sauce (as it's a cool day and it sounded good and I had all of the ingredients). (Note this pasta isn't very common so holding out until the next bag was bought seemed like not the best option.)

BIG MISTAKE. The insides of the pasta appear to have retained way more water than I expected and my lunch was a bit of a goopy mess. This could also have been my fault for having used 2 T of milk instead of cream (didn't have cream), but the thinness all seemed to be due to water. To which I say, yuck! Except, well, it was still pretty edible. Still, notes for the future: bucatini is not a joyous marriage with a carbonara sauce.

This is a really hearty recipe that's really easy and cheap to make and ... bonus ... it works for vegans, too. And you can fake it pretty well with canned goods.

2 cans garbanzo beans (or 1 cup dried, soaked and cooked, if you want to be hardcore)
1 T olive oil
1 garlic clove
1 fresh rosemary sprig (or no rosemary if you don't want)
9 oz tomatoes, peeled and chopped (I used one "box," or one can, but it seemed to want more) - est 5-6 medium
5 oz fresh tagliatelle, cut into short lengths (or whatever pasta you like, something chunky is best)

Drain half of your cooked beans, put into the blender and puree. Sautee garlic and rosemary in oil, then add tomatoes, and cook for ten minutes. Put puree and rest of beans into tomatoes, add a bit of salt, and cook down for a while. The recipe recommends cooking the pasta right in the tomato, but when I made it I cooked the pasta separately and ladled the mix on top. Drizzle with yummy olive oil and sprinkle some cheese on top if you like it.

For this recipe, I'll note the fresher the ingredients, the better it tastes. It also likes to have time for the ingredients to meld together in the pot. You can probably get nice results with basil instead of rosemary. It's a very forgiving recipe. Have fun with it!

I now have dirt between my toes (even though I wore shoes!). All of the known dahlias have been planted (only about 10, I think). A lot more garden space has been opened thanks to

shadowdaddy and

wechsler's good efforts. I need to get the glads in but I think this is a fine time to call it done for the day.

Thanks to

wechsler for making us lunch. I have no idea what to do about dinner right now but I did enjoy the peppered duck breasts. And the caponata I made last night (recipe here, more info on cooking eggplant here) was even better today. God knows I made enough to serve eight, or possibly 12 given that it's served 8 so far and we're not done with it yet.

With luck,

shadowdaddy will make cookies as promised. Me, I think I need a shower.

Normally I wouldn't eat cauliflower - but I will give this recipe a try - only without the anchovies.

1 lb bucatini (hollow spaghetti)
1 med cauliflower
2 oz golden raisins
minced onion (actual amount not listed in recipe! one small?)
1 oz pine nutes
1 small bag of saffron (no idea how much this is but use your judgment)
2 oz fillets of anchovy in oil - only, not so much, as in my mind fish would ruin it!
5 T extra virgin olive oil
Salt, pepper to tast

Cut off tops (florets) of caulifower and parboil in salted water for 5 minutes. Drain (reserving the water) and put aside.

Brown the minced onion in a saucepan with plenty of oil. Add the anchovy, drained and chopped, until it dissolves. (Or skip it. I will.) Add raisins, pine nuts, cauliflower, then brown on moderate flame.

Dissolve the saffron in 1/2 C of the cauliflower broth. Add salt and pepper to taste and cook for 15 minutes. Boil the pasta until done in the remaining brother, stir into the sauce, rest for one minute, then serve.

The key here is almonds. I'll be trying this this week, I think ...

1 pound pasta (recommended "busiate," swirly like Goldilock's hair, but a fettucine okay too)
2 lbs ripe tomatoes
4 cloves garlic
3 1/2 oz peeled and toasted almonds
1 "tuft" basil
1/2 cup olive oil (the good stuff)
4 T grated pecorino
salt, pepper

Blanch, peel, seed, and chop tomoatoes. Crush almonds (in mortar or food processor). Keep aside. Mix garlic, basil, salt, and crush. Add tomatoes and also crush. Add almonds, stir in oil, salt and pepper. Let rest for a few hours. Serve with cheese on the side.

So I gave a try at making Pasta Alla Carrettierra tonight. I had bought breadcrumbs in Palermo and picked up some ewe's milk cheese to mock what I thought the proper flavor profile was. (Note: I used manchego as I'd, er, inadvertently left the Asiago at home.)

I wound up kind of following this recipe but then adding in an idea from another recipe and adding in cubes of cheese (to pump up the protein). My recipe (limited somewhat by not remembering to buy any fresh herbs at the grocery store) was like this:

6 T olive oil
add 5 fat cubes of minced garlic. As they go golden ....
add in breadcrumbs and fry till golden. I can't tell you how much to use as I put in way too many. Probably a few T would do - I think I added almost a cup!

At this point I stirred in 1-2 T dried parsley (as I had no fresh and had forgotten to buy basil either), then added ....
2 cans of chopped tomatoes in sauce ...
and let it all cook for a while, all the while going OMG I put in too many breadcrumbs. Probably one can would be okay if you hadn't biffed the breadcrumbs like I did. Also note that while many of the recipes I linked to recommended raw tomatoes, or cooking raw tomatoes, that actually wasn't the flavor profile of what I had in Catania - no surprise as it's not exactly tomato season!

The bucatini finished cooking, I drained it, then dressed it with really good olive oil, then smooshed in some of the sauce, then added chunks of young pecorino and served it with grated manchego on the side to put on top.

Conclusion: delicious. Key ingredient: garlic and breadcrumbs! The cheese was not the crack-like component of the original recipe, which is good to know as for whatever reason Asiago seems much harder to find in London than it was in the US.

Next recipe: pasta with a RAW GARLIC sauce. I am looking forward to this! Also, having

trishpiglet and

babysimon for dinner was a great time and I'm happy I was able to distract them from my lack of dessert options by giving them Marsala. Now I can go and read a trashy Charlaine Harris mystery and consider my evening well spent!

This recipe reminds me of a vegetarian carbonara - it's quite good. It's impressive what you can do with so few ingredients! This is what we just had for lunch, yet another winner from the Real Sicilian Cookery book. Tomorrow I'm going to try the pasta Nciaciata - one veggie pan (which probably is a different recipe if you're being a traditionalist) and one meat pan. I bet it will be great!

Zucchini pasta (Courgettes pasta)
Note: the kind of pasta you use doesn't really matter - you just want something fairly chunky
400 g pasta (enough for 4 people)
500 g zucchini (about four)
100 g of soft cheese (ricotta - I used about half a cup)
100 g parmesan
30 g margarine (I used two tablespoons butter)
1 egg (yolk only)
salt and pepper
olive oil

( Pat it and prick it and mark it with T ... )

I am not at Iron Man right now - I spent about two hours going through boxes of stuff, was obliged to dash out to buy groceries before the 5 PM Sunday closing time, and am tuckered out now. Maybe later ... though

shadowdaddy says he wants to come home and play some of our new board games and drink green tea martinis later, which I think sounds like a right pleasant Sunday evening.

Current Mood: full

So I decided to try another recipe from one of the Sicilian cookbooks - pasta with sausage and pistachios. My test subjects

shadowdaddy and

wechsler pronounced it "gorgeous," or at least that might have been what they said around the general gobbling (I'll assume the fact

shadowdaddy biked into work and back didn't influence that much, though I think it is why he scraped out what was left from the bowl). J said it really seemed to want to be eaten at an outdoor cafe with a view of the Mediterranean, but, well ... at least it's warm enough outside that I could open the windows this afternoon.

Anyway, for those interested (it's really easy!):

Pasta with sausage and pistachios recipe

400 g pasta (enough for 3 or 4 - I used medium shells)
400 g sausage (I used about six Italian sausages for three people )
1 onion, finely chopped
60 g of pistachios (I'm afraid I didn't measure this either, I just added a bunch - probably a quarter cup)
a "packet" of cooking cream (I'm not sure how one puts cream in a packet, but I think what I used was about half a cup)

Cook the onion with a little water, then add the sausage (chopped) and brown them up. When they're done, add the pistachio (crushed). Boil the pasta until cooked, drain it, then add it into a tureen (I used the bowl I bought with

spikeylady in Madrid - good memories!) with the cream and sausage/nut mix. Serve hot. (Note: I think you don't want this too wet, so add about the right amount of cream to kind of lubricate the noodles but not leave puddles in the bowl. I also suggest putting some nuts on top to make it look pretty.)

This is right next to a recipe for a pasta with courgette "sauce" that's right tasty, and is followed by four pages of rabbit recipes. I've got to say, bringing back home cookbooks was really the best idea ever.

Tonight (what's left of it): pack for Barcelona, and drink cider. :-)

Rigatoni alla Norma

Alla Norma is tomatoes and aubergine/eggplant and cheese. The recommended cheese is ricotta, but it's a crumbly ricotta ("ricotta salata," salted ricotta) and one of the places I went to had a smoked cheese on top, so I did that for this version but also put wet ricotta on the bottom, underneath the tomato/garlic/onion/basil mixture. (After eating this three times in a week, I was really impressed by what a wide variety of recipes went by the same name.) The kicker seems to be soaking the sliced eggplant in salted water - I couldn't believe the way this changed the flavor! I also "dressed" the cooked tomato mixture with some really nice olive oil as recommended by my cookbook. So even though I'd never made this before and don't even like eggplant (normally), this dish was very tasty and a huge success. Not bad for a lazy night at home!