Ziti for the Masses

There are times when gourmet intentions must be thrown out the window.

Last fall, for example, our son was born, and my time to cook disappeared. We received a steady stream of visitors, and none of them came empty handed. Before they sat down to chat with me they handed Shefali a casserole dish large enough to feed the two of us for days. We were humbled by their generosity, as we received more than 30 meals from friends and family. What they'd cooked didn't matter. The food was always satisfying.

When friends of ours recently had triplets, I paid it forward and made portable meals - 24 total - fast enough to deliver them that evening. 

When I was a child my dad traveled often and my mom had to feed the three kids. Between long days at the pool and ball games in the evenings she couldn't spend much time in the kitchen, but we always ate home-cooked food.

This week, 13 of us gathered at my table for Thanksgiving Dinner. Everyone arrived a day or two early, so as host I needed a meal before "the meal."

Vodka Sauce - a Variation

One way to quickly judge an Italian restaurant's menu is to scan the number of different sauces it pairs with pasta. All too often restaurants will serve a dozen different pasta shapes "tossed in a cream sauce." It's hard to screw up a cream sauce, since large doses of dairy (like heavy cream) can mask even the most horrendous sauces. When I see a menu full of cream sauces, I immediately lower my expectations.

That does not, however, mean that all cream sauces are garbage.

One way to build great flavor into a cream sauce is to add liquor, let the alcohol cook away, then add the cream. This will give you a base of flavors in the sauce that the cream won't overwhelm.

A great example is the brandy cream sauce at Bocci. Its bold flavor includes, but isn't limited to, the cream that thickens it. Plus, it's great with seafood. Bocci's former (Sicilian) chef, Michelle Rizzo, used to offer a dish called "crepes alla Michelle," featuring shrimp and scallops in the brandy cream sauce, served over an egg crepe instead of pasta. It was my favorite meal on the menu.

One of Shefali's favorite sauces is the more traditional vodka sauce. Often served at restaurants with sausage and penne, the vodka, black pepper, and crushed red pepper makes it spicier than most cream sauces. We make it at home regularly and experiment with different ways to serve it.

I've found that crab meat works especially well with vodka sauce. It's a lighter protein source than sausage, which works well because it offsets the heavy cream, and the sweetness of the crab meat compliments the acidity from the tomatoes. In honor of chef Rizzo, we eat it over eggs.

Vodka Sauce with Crab Over Crepes

Serves 4

1 pound (or more) lump crab meat, cooked
4 tbs olive oil

5 cloves garlic, diced

1+ tsp crushed red pepper

1 28-oz can crushed tomatoes or 2 cups Christopher Sauce  or 2 pounds fresh tomatoes, cored, peeled and chopped

1/2 cup vodka

1 cup cream

1/2 tsp black pepper

12 fresh basil leaves, chopped or 1 tsp dried basil

salt

1. Heat the olive oil in a sauce pan, then add the garlic. 

2. As the garlic begins to brown, add the crushed red pepper and let cook for 30 seconds.

3. Add the tomatoes or Christopher Sauce and simmer for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, add salt to taste.

4. Add the vodka, stir, and let simmer for another 5 minutes.

5. Add the cream, black pepper and basil. Stir and simmer for 5 more minutes.

6. Transfer the sauce to a blender or food processor and mix until it becomes a rough puree.

7. Return it to the pan, add the crab, simmer for a couple more minutes and serve.

Egg Crepes

8 eggs

1/4 cup milk or cream

2 tbs olive oil or butter

salt

1. Beat eggs together with milk and salt.

2. Heat the olive oil in a skillet, then add 1/4 of the egg batter.

3. Let the batter set. Run a spatula underneath it to keep it from sticking. Flip the egg once, let it cook through, then slide out of the pan.

4. Roll the crepe on a plate and top with the sauce.

5. Repeat.

Three Pepper Parade

This week's post comes from Cleveland, where my brother used local meat, produce and pasta to create a most excellent photo and meal.

Hello blogger friends! This weekend I used a variety of ingredients from my Fresh Fork CSA basket and made a dynomite Italian dish.

I call it "Italian Three Pepper Parade," or stuffed bell and banana peppers over red pepper pasta. Here's how I did it:

Gluten Free Chicken Parm

One thing Indian and Italian families seem to have in common is the tradition of eating your way through family visits. Meals tend to be long, frequent and excessive, and after awhile you forget what it feels like to be "hungry." My brother-in-law, Manek flew down frown New York with his girlfriend this weekend, so we acted accordingly.

Manek's favorite Italian dish is Chicken Parmesan, so we make it at home every time he visits. These days, however, he's following a gluten and dairy free diet, so we had to get creative. I don't remember my family making Chicken Parmesan growing up, so I learned from Mario Batali. This time, we made a few adjustments, the most obvious one being serving it with polenta instead of pasta. We also only coated the chicken in bread crumbs and not flour - something I would change next time.

Regardless, it turned out pretty awesome.

A Family Meal

My in-laws and I descended upon Cleveland last weekend to watch Shefali's brother, Manek, play in the Tavern Club Invitational. My parents saw the weekend as a special occasion and a reason to have everyone over for family meals.

Manek won the Pro-Am championship, and Saturday was also his birthday, so we had reason to celebrate. Nine of us sat at the table and enjoyed salad, spaghetti and meatballs with Christopher Sauce, stuffed hot peppers and great wine. For dessert, my mom presented Manek a massive tub of banana pudding, complete with candles.

In all, there were nine of us, and we made short work of the meal. The weather in Cleveland this time of year makes it all the more satisfying to eat well among family. We hope to make the Tavern Club Invitational an annual event.

My dad gets full credit for the meal, as he cooked everything himself.

Meatballs:

1 pound ground beef
1-3 eggs**
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
2 tbs parsley or oregano
1 1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 onion, chopped or 1-2 tbs of onion powder

**My dad remembers watching his grandmother and Aunt Lucy make meatballs by mixing as many as three eggs into each pound of beef. He prefers one egg per pound of meat. Looking back, he believes it was their way of stretching the pound of meat (and the budget) so that it could feed more people.

Mix the eggs into the meat, then add the dry ingredients, adjusting the quantities until the meat has the right consistency (similar to burgers). Roll the meat into balls slightly larger than golf balls and arrange on a baking sheet. Brown the meatballs in the oven, then remove before they are fully cooked. Simmer them in Christopher Sauce to finish.

Stuffed Peppers:

12 hot banana peppers

3/4 pound hot italian sausage

3/4 pound mild italian sausage

1 egg

grated parmesan cheese

bread crumbs

1/2 tsp black pepper

1 tsp salt

Pecorino Romano Cheese

About 1 quart of Christopher Sauce

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Cut the top off the peppers and put the tops aside for later. Clean out the inside of the peppers.

Bring a pot of water to a boil and put the peppers in the boiling water for about 5 minutes (they should stay firm). Remove and let them cool.

In a sauce pan, add 1-2 cups of Christopher Sauce. Chop the top of the peppers you had set aside and add it to the sauce. You should make the sauce spicy to your taste. Hot peppers' heat can vary significantly. Let the sauce simmer for a while stuffing peppers.

In a bowl, combine the sausage (hot and mild), egg, salt and pepper, and 1/2 cup of the spiced-up Christopher sauce. Add parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs in equal parts until you like the consistency. It should be somewhat firm but not too much, as it will have to flow in a piping bag to fill the peppers. If you don't want to try to fill them whole you can cut the peppers in half lengthwise and fill them laying flat in a baking dish.

Put the sausage mixture in a piping bag and fill the peppers (or fill them laying flat in a baking dish). Put the peppers in a baking dish and cover with the spiced-up sauce. Cover the peppers and sauce in grated Pecorino Romano cheese. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the peppers.

You should alter the recipe based on how hot you want the dish. I found the dish is highly dependent on the hotness of the peppers. If they're pretty hot, then you don't need to spice up the stuffing and sauce too much. If they are milder and you want some more spice you can add some heat to the sausage filling (crushed red pepper , etc.) or the sauce.

The Sauce

My family treats its traditional red sauce like others practice religion - we all believe in it, that it's sacred and essential for life, but each of us celebrates it by making it our own way.

I grew up eating it at least once a week, oblivious to its greatness in a world full of watery, bland, sugar-laden impostors. I realized how fortunate I was while studying abroad in Ireland, living on a tight budget in an apartment with a small kitchen and limited cooking tools. There was so much to see and do in Galway that my friends and I didn't take the time to cook often, so while scrambling to come up with dinner one night I picked up a jar of Prego, threw a can of tuna in it and boiled half a box of penne.

Assembled on the plate, it looked decent enough. The meal had cost only a couple of bucks, and there was enough leftover to cover the next day's lunch. But it didn't smell the same. I took my first bite and suddenly felt very alone, in a world far from home.

This, I thought, can NEVER happen again.

Later that night, I called home. I needed to hear familiar voices, but I didn't mention the meal. I'd learned my lesson, and news of the incident would not go over well.

A few years later, while visiting my girlfriend (now wife), Shefali, I learned another lesson in sauce tradition. She was in the middle of a clinical rotation in Boston, and I was there for several days between Christmas and New Year's. The day I arrived, I opened her fridge and saw a half-eaten jar of Ragu Old World Style. It was as if I was back in Ireland, cold, alone and confused again. I quickly scanned the room to see what else had deceived me. Was I really planning to marry a girl who eats sauce from a plastic jar?

I took a few deep breaths, regrouped and found some much needed perspective. Shefali's from India, not Italy. At the time, she didn't know puttanesca from arrabiata. Pasta in India was like most Indian food here in the US - a shell of what it's supposed to be

What I didn't see in her fridge were jars of curry and tikka masala. She knew good food, but I hadn't shown her good sauce.

The next day she had to work, so I canceled my plans to explore Cambridge and instead walked to the nearest grocery store, carried several pounds of canned tomatoes back to her house and over the course of the afternoon filled her roommate's largest pot with my family's sauce. When she got home, I opened her freezer and showed her the stacked plastic bins as well as the meats she would cook and add to each. I also asked her to please never buy sauce again.

Memorable as my family's recipe may be, I've had a hard time pinpointing the exact recipe. It appears every cook in the family follows a slightly different recipe. For example, my dad includes green peppers, but Aunt Mary uses only onions. Grandma Jean slow cooks it all day, often in a Crock Pot, while others let it simmer for only an hour. I add a lot of crushed red pepper for spice.

Regardless of the disagreement and countless variations, several important universals exist:

- garlic and onions are essential
- cans of peeled, whole tomatoes are best, but other varieties (crushed, diced) work as well.
- add tomato paste in addition to the canned tomatoes
- season with oregano
- adjust the seasonings (salt, pepper, oregano, parsley, etc.) after the sauce simmers for an hour
- let the sauce simmer for at least one hour (the longer the better).

Here is the recipe in its entirety, as my father taught it to me:

1. In a large pot, simmer a few cloves of garlic (diced) in olive oil.

2. Add 1 big can (28 oz) of tomatoes, 2 cans of tomato paste, and 4 cans of water (2 cans water for every can of tomato paste)

3. Add 1/2 of 1 large onion, chopped

4. Add 4 cloves of garlic, cut into large pieces

5. Add 1 bell pepper, diced

6. Cover the top of the sauce with dried oregano. Stir in the oregano and add 2 bay leaves.

7. Let the sauce simmer for at least one hour.

8 After the sauce has simmered, season with salt, pepper, garlic, oregano, etc. to taste.