Shells with taleggio, pecorino romano and parmesan topped with lightly sautéed kale
Filed under Pasta …
Dinner Tonight
From this:
To this:
To this:
Homemade fettucini with cauliflower and brussels sprouts
From this recipe, with fresh pasta instead of dried
The First Supper: Saint Paul
When you move to a city named after a saint, you should probably make a biblical reference in title of the post about the first meal in your new kitchen, right? And you should break in your new kitchen by cranking up the oven to 400-degrees twice in the same steamy afternoon to make a comforting meal and then toast your new place with tall glasses of milk and water because you forgot to buy wine, right? And you should whip out your phone to take pictures of the tourists tooling around your new neighborhood on Segways, right? Check, check, and check.
Our first home-cooked Saint Paul meal started with a lovely composed salad of golden and chioggia beets, sun gold cherry tomatoes, fresh chives, crumbled blue cheese, and a drizzle of buttermilk dressing. Simple, summery and delicious.
For the main course, we had Pimiento Mac and Cheese. I’ve been craving mac and cheese for weeks, and a scoop of the sorry excuse for it on the Whole Foods salad bar that I ate last week just didn’t cut it. I thumbed through a few cookbooks in search of a good recipe before remembering a recent issue of Bon Appetit with a picture of gooey mac and cheese on the cover. The cover photo turned out to be Pimiento Mac and Cheese, and although it wasn’t the traditional route I had originally planned on taking, it looked too good to pass up.
(Sorry for the rotten photos – I ran out of daylight.)
It was awesome! It was close enough to regular mac and cheese to satisfy my craving, but it also had enough going on to make it new and exciting, just like our new living arrangement. Instead of starting the cheese sauce with butter, flour and whole milk, you boil a red pepper in a little water until it softens and then purée it with roasted peppers, garlic and a tiny bit of butter. So, you know, you start with vegetables, and vegetables are good for you. It’s healthy. Mac and cheese for your health. Then you add a few cups of cheese to the pepper mixture and maybe you sample a little of the cheese as you’re grating it, but at least you’re adding all of that cheese to pureed peppers instead of a creamy béchamel sauce, right?
Matt declared this the best mac and cheese that I’ve ever made, and I tend to agree, which brings up a new issue: who gets to eat the leftovers?
Croissants & Other Things
I’m happy to announce that chocolate croissants are overwhelming choice for how I should use my See’s chocolate chips.
Now I have an excuse to stop swooning over photos of croissants and actually make them.
I have to decide whether I want to use the Pain au Chocolat recipe from Tartine…
Or the croissant recipe from Tartine Bread that begins with a bread starter.
Or both?
In other news, we broke in my new pasta machine this week! I’ve had the KitchenAid pasta discs for a couple of years, and they work fairly well, but I accidentally destroyed the fettucini disc and the lasagna disc kind of sucks, so unless we want round noodles, we have to roll the dough with a rolling pin and cut noodles with a pizza cutter. While that method works well, it’s hard to get the noodles very thin or evenly sliced, so they don’t always cook quickly or uniformly. After months of deliberation, I put a Williams-Sonoma gift card that I’ve been holding onto since Christmas to use and bought a pasta machine.
I made a batch of semolina pasta dough for the machine’s first run, and then I realized that it was way too wet to make it through the roller without sticking to every surface that it touched. Slightly frustrated, I quickly made a batch of egg/all-purpose flour dough, and the fun began.
Making pasta with the machine was super easy (although you might think otherwise by reading some of the reviews - tip: use common sense when the directions seem backward), and although we’ve always been amazed by the results when making pasta from scratch, this batch was easily the best yet. The noodles were thin and uniform, and while I’m fairly certain that any noodles would taste great in homemade pasta carbonara, these were exceptional. Now if only I could recreate the mind-blowing Pasta Negra with Sea Urchin, Chili, Mussels, and Tomato that we had at Bar La Grassa two weeks ago…
