smitten kitchen

Believe it or not, I’ve actually cooked dinner a few times this month. Like, three! Maybe even four. I don’t know, does a corn tortillas chmeared with refried beans, salsa and toasted with some shredded cheese on top count as dinner? Oh it does? Then definitely, most certainly four. We’re all about the refined eatin’ at the smittenkitchen.

But this dish is a winner. In fact, if I weren’t working on a few humongous projects right now I would have made it again, maybe even twice. It’s the perfect antidote to the simultaneous and conflicting internal dialogue of “I’m craving a big bowl of spaghetti!” and “But it’s bathing suit season!” Also, it’s really nice to find ways to lighten up pasta when it is hot and sticky and borderline-rainy every single day and you’re beginning to believe that you might not get to the beach even once this summer, prepared or not.

The recipe comes from Michael Chiarello and I’d seen him make it a few years ago on his Food Network show, back when they played it more than once a week, on Mondays, at 1 a.m. (Fine, I’m exaggerating, but that was indeed the last time I saw it, and it was DVRed .) It was one of those “here, I cook healthy too” episodes that always make me giggle because they usually so eloquently sum up our American confusion over what “healthy” actually means (see this cake for further evidence).

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I’m sorry. I know, this isn’t right. Not fair. Totally cruel. We’re just weeks from bathing suit season and this here is no friend to lycra.

But I had to. I promised you this and I had to make it right.

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Do you ever have those recipes where are you just positively, absolutely certain that they will be terrible and that you shouldn’t make them… and yet, you are inexplicably drawn to them and know they’re not going to stop nudging you until you cave? Right, so this was one of those.

You see, several years ago, I was watching some undoubtedly average “healthy cooking” show where the chef suggested that one take half the pasta they wish to eat, replace it with chunks of cauliflower, boil them together and then cover it with marinara sauce. Even though I never made it or even considered making it, it turned my stomach so much that to this day, I can’t seem to forget it. Yes, let’s cook cauliflower in the least appetizing way possible because it is “health food.” Right. Where do I sign up?!

This was among the reasons that I approached the this dish from my other new favorite cookbook, Chez Panisse Vegetables, with great trepidation. It involved several things that give me pause, the first being that combination of cauliflower and pasta which reminded me of that fateful, stomach-turning show. Yet the cauliflower was just one of the things that so far exceeded my expectations of this dish, we are actually venturing into “mind was blown” territory–crunchy, nutty and this might be the only way I cook it for now on. (Just kidding! Er, maybe.)

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Last Valentine’s Day, Alex and I had dinner at Prune. Alex wore my favorite suit of his and brought a giant bouquet of roses and a gift, because he’s spoil-me-rotten like that. We had the most decadent meal, but I couldn’t help but go home with the nagging feeling that I had ordered from the wrong side of the menu. You see, chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s menus are an editorial delight, and on Valentine’s Day she went to town with an especially charmingly bipolar one.

The Lovers’ Menu from which we ordered had all sorts of rich and spectacular foods, including homemade chocolate kisses (with tissue paper messages) dolloped out by a friend of mine who was working there as a pastry chef at the time. But the other side, the Cynics’ menu–with its Broken Vinaigrette, Whore’s (Puttanesca) Pasta, Cold Shoulder of Pork and Coffee and Cigarettes, oh and at half the price–well, it was evident that the bitter folks were having more fun. Really, it’s not the first time. Because my Valentine and I have a sense of humor (and also due to my inherent dislike of Special Romantical Menus in general) I couldn’t resist my own recreation of a Not Really Cynic’s Menu Thursday night: Pasta Puttanesca and a Bitter Salad with Broken Artichoke Hearts.

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Last month, I was cleaning photos off on my old hard drive and discovered a glaring oversight on my food blogging part: I had never told you about one of my proudest kitchen triumphs to date, mastering the pasta nest!

By “pasta nest” I mean the method of creating a well inside a mound of flour, placing several egg yolks in the center and creating pasta dough with your fingertips alone. Why is this process so intimidating? Don’t countless cooks all over Italy do precisely this every single day without fail? Clearly, they have never read Jeffrey Steingarten, who I alone blame for my fear of The Nest.

“… I ran into a problem,” Steingarten writes in The Man Who Ate Everything.

As I began to incorporate flour from the crater’s inner wall, a wavelet of egg slashed over the top, causing a serious erosion problem, and when I nimble scooped up a handful of flour and from the stable side of the mound and used it to stanch the flow, the crate collapsed. A torrent of egg yolks, now thick with flour and cornmeal, surged across the table, carried a pile of chopped garlic, and like molten lava rolling over a Hawaiin housing development, leaving death and destruction in its wake, headed toward my handwritten notes. As I snatched away the notebook, the flood plunged on, lifting two rosemary branches as though they were matchsticks and cascading over the edge of the table and into an open silverware drawer…

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