Ziti with Tuscan-Style Cauliflower

It's been such a busy few weeks at work. I've barely had time for anything, be it blog posts, reading, or attending my tripe cookers anonymous meetings. These next few days off have been long awaited and I am trying to play catch-up with all of my chores, so I find myself rummaging through the cookbook looking for something quick to make. When time is of the essence, make some pasta.

Pasta is by far my favorite thing to make. I mean, who doesn't love a plate of pasta? From a cooks perspective it's cheap, tasty, and very versatile. Hot outside? Make it light with oil, garlic, and some chillies. Cold? Pair it with a hearty Ragu, you know the 'stick to your ribs' kind. 

Some pasta dishes take longer to prepare than others, but most, like this one, can be made in about the time it takes to bring some water to a boil. Furthermore, this one is something that my father would call a 'one-pot wonder', with everything prepared in one pan, on the stove, without the need to use the oven and further heat the house. 

Mario uses common ingredients, available in almost every grocery store year round, so making this dish is very easy and won't require extensive ingredient searching. Another plus on a busy schedule. 

You'll want to get that pot of water boiling for the pasta, because this ones a quickie. And your pasta water should have salt in it. When the pasta is cooking, it'll absorb the salt which flavors the pasta. And we like flavor, right? You won't need much salt, about a good handful's worth will do. 

I start by taking a head of cauliflower and cutting it into 1 inch pieces. 

Next I diced some red onions and garlic. 

I then heated extra virgin olive oil until almost smoking and add the red onion and garlic, with a chiffonade of fresh mint and some chili flakes. It only needs to cook about a minute until the garlic is slightly browned. I'm eager to see how the mint will work in this dish. 

Next, the cauliflower is added to the pan to cook in the oil/onion mixture. It should take about 7 minutes to cook through. This is a non-blanching technique that Mario learned in Tuscany. The cauliflower cooks by absorbing the oil. Skipping the blanching step saves time, prevents dirtying more dishes, and adds great flavor to an otherwise bland vegetable. This is also a good time to drop your ziti into the pasta pot. 

Once the ziti is almost al dente, I strain it and add it to the sauté pan with the cauliflower mixture. It cooks for an additional 30 seconds or so, just enough to bring the pasta to the point of al dente. That is, cooked but with a slight bite. 

Of course, how can we forget a shaving of the 'undisputed king of all cheese'? I shave some Parmesan and add some more fresh mint off the heat. 

It's ready to plate. 

This made for a perfect light lunch, although it's suitable for dinner too. And because it's vegetarian, you can please almost anyone by making this.

 I liked it. Not quite to the extent of reenacting Meg Ryan's diner scene with Billy Crystal in 'When Harry met Sally'. But I liked it. The mint wasn't overpowering and the cauliflower picked up some great flavor. The fact that this meal is virtually fool proof is a big plus too. 

Next time, having more rest in me, I'd like to tackle something that's a little bit more of a challenge. Until next time...

Warm Tripe alla Parmigiana

For this next post, I decided to really step out of the box and try something new. Not just something new in the sense of a new recipe, but also that of a new product that I have never worked with before. Tripe. 

I found myself alone on a Thursday night this week, my wife away on a short vacation, myself working a long week in the kitchen, so I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to try something that my family might call a little funky. Even Mario admits in the recipe notes that this used to be a tough sell in his restaurant. But this dish did look really good, tripe that was swimming in a rich tomato sauce with root vegetables and some shaved Parmesan cheese. Mario assures us that this dish has gained popularity at Babbo and now flies out the kitchen door. So what the heck? I'll give it a try. 

So just what is tripe? It's the lining from a cow's stomach. Actually it can come from a variety of animals, but most commonly tripe comes from cow. Mmmmm, stomach lining. Very appealing isn't it? But to be fair, tripe is right in line with the Italian's philosophy of nothing goes to waste. 

Tripe is actually very popular in many cuisines of the world. In France, it is boiled then smoked and made into Andouille sausage. In India, it is made into a stew called Chakna. In Scotland, it is the main ingredient in the making of haggis. In Mexico, it is made into a stew called Menudo. And that pho that you get at the Vietnamese restaurant? Yep it's in there. In fact, tripe is often used as a filler in many American breakfast sausages. 

I was able to find some tripe at my local grocery store. I mean it's not like there's a long line of people waiting to buy it. I was probably the only one that bought any this week. 

The recipe called for what is known as the honeycomb variety of beef tripe, which gets its name because as you can see it looks like a giant honeycomb. 

I start by placing the tripe and a large pot and covered it with water. 

To the water is added vinegar and vanilla extract. I know, it sounded weird to me too, but Mario insists that by putting these two ingredients in the pot of tripe, it will remove the uric smell that often makes tripe objectionable. 

The tripe gets brought to a boil, then reduced to a simmer for about an hour until tender....

Or so the instructions say.....

I gave the tripe over an hour and a half. It was tougher than shoe leather. But by this time it was approaching about 9 o'clock at night, so I took the pot off the heat. No big deal I thought. The next step in the process was to cool the tripe overnight in the cooking liquid anyway, so I figured that I would give it a little bit more cooking time the next night when I finished the preparation for my dinner. 

Before I started re-preparing the tripe, I did plenty of research to make sure that I wasn't seeing something wrong. The Internet was quite inconsistent with cooking time for tripe. Many people said an hour and a half, some said that it would take at least a couple of hours, and Thomas Keller of the French Laundry Cookbook has a tripe recipe that cooks for about 5 hours. 

So I put the tripe back onto the stove and brought it to a simmer for several hours.....

Yep, still shoe leather. Except now I had this god awful smell of tripe cooking in my home. It was really nauseating. Like I had a golf ball of vomit in the back of my throat. 

I checked the tripe again. Way too tough.

At this point, having gone way past the one hour cooking time in the instructions, and furiously trying to light every scented candle that I own to kill the aroma, I was left with a worthless piece of stomach, while mine remained empty. I decided to cut my losses and just stop this train wreck altogether. Luckily tripe is very inexpensive, less than $3 a pound, so I don't feel bad letting this go. I just feel bummed that we have another recipe that didn't quite work out for this blog. 

Mine: 

Mario's: 

I have no idea what went wrong here. Did I get a bad piece of tripe? Mario if you are out there in Internet Land I could really use your help on this one!

I really doubt that I would try to make this dish again. The cookbook was right though. It did fly out of my kitchen. 'Right into the fuckin' bin', as Gordon Ramsey would say. 

Until next time...

Basic Tomato Sauce

This next recipe, very much like the brown chicken stock that I made in a previous post, is not a major player in the collection of recipes in this cookbook. But it is a very important one nonetheless. It is something that is used throughout the book as a part of other recipes, and darned tasty if I do say so myself. Even in French cuisine, tomato sauce is considered to be one of the five mother sauces. So because of that, I am giving the tomato sauce its own post. 

If you put 100 people in a room and ask them how they make their tomato sauce, you would probably get 100 different answers. Do you prefer it smooth or chunky? Onions or no onions? Spicy? The combinations are quite infinite. But again, it's all in personal preference, and something that you the home cook can and should personalize whenever and wherever you can. 

I believe that every home cook should have a good go-to tomato sauce in their repertoire, and you can't go wrong with Mario's. I've used it a lot in the past. It's also relatively simple to make and it doesn't take that long to cook. I would make a big batch and either can it for future use, or put a bunch in the freezer for a later time. 

Let's dive in to this sauce. 

First I took and small diced some onion thinly sliced some garlic. 

I started cooking the onion mixture in a sauce pot over medium heat, in extra-virgin olive oil, until the onions got golden brown. 

Next was to add some fresh thyme and very thinly shredded carrot and combine with the onion mixture to cook a few minutes more. I know what you are thinking, not many of you are probably used to putting carrots into your tomato sauce. So why does Mario do it? The sweetness from the carrot counterbalances the acidity and bitterness of the tomatoes. Mario said to finely shred the carrot, so I used my micro plane in order to do so. This shaved the carrot so fine that once it started to heat up it basically just melted within the sauce. 

While that was going, I hand crushed my cans of whole peeled tomatoes. Again, this is where you want to use high-quality product, preferably San Marzano tomatoes. They are much sweeter than their American counterpart. 

The tomatoes get added into the sauce pot. The mixture is brought to a boil and then reduced down to a simmer for approximately half an hour, or until the tomato sauce resembles the texture of hot cereal. 

At this point the tomato sauce is all done, it just needs a little bit of salt to taste. As you can see, this sauce is quite chunky. If you prefer yours to be really smooth, after it has cooled you can purée your sauce if you wish. I happen to like mine a little bit on the chunky side just like Mario's. 

I had some guests over the house this weekend where I had the opportunity to use the tomato sauce with something that I was cooking for them. Everyone seemed to really like it. In fact, my batch of sauce was completely used up! I am going to have to make another batch so that I can keep it in the freezer to use when I come across it again in some of the recipes. 

Feel free to let me know what you think of this sauce while you are cooking with me at home. Until next time...