Sounds fancy, but was very simple. Used some inexpensive capulin caviar from an Xmas gift box from last year. Cream sauce was made with some crema mexicana and some bacon. Nice lunch using what was in the fridge.
Summer is definitely over so I cut all of the basil from the garden and made a pesto sauce. According to Marcella Hazan in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking:
“When serving pesto on spaghetti or noodles, the full Genoese treatment calls for the addition of boiled new potatoes and green beans. When all its components are right, there is no single dish more delicious in the entire Italian pasta repertory.”
Maybe a bit of an overstatement since I am very partial to Bucatini all’Amatriciana. Never the less, this was sensational.
I made this fresh pasta to serve with a cream sauce made with chopped porcini stems.
Nigella Lawson is not a writer that seems to get as much attention as the celebrity chefs. But her words and recipes most appeal to me, resonate within me, and inspire me more than any other. I guess if I had a fraction of the talent of Jacques Pepin, I would aspire to his level of artistic greatness. But Nigella totally lacks any kind of cheffy (is that a word?) pretense. It is all about simple recipes to deliver as much pleasure and satisfaction to the people we care about.
Based on one of her recipes, today we had a simple, but deeply satisfying, lunch using the leftover brick-oven chicken from yesterday. Spaghetti, chicken, raisins, toasted pine nuts, rosemary, parsley. NO CHEESE. The light smokiness of the chicken added a wonderful additional layer of flavor.
Many of my favorite dishes are based on her recipes. I’ll cover them in future blog posts.
What happens if you create a broth from shrimp shells and then use the broth for poaching jumbo shrimp for cocktails. And then you freeze that broth and use it for poaching the next batch of shrimp? And what do you think it will taste like 10 years and a few hundred pounds of shrimp later? Intense and unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. The idea came from a Mark Bittman recipe in Cook’s Illustrated back in July/August 1997. I continue to use this broth for poaching, but I also use a little bit here and there to add a deeply satisfying brininess to other seafood dishes.
Today we had spaghetti with crab based loosely on a recipe from Reed Hearon’s Rose Pistola Cookbook. This recipe calls for fresh dungeness crabs and uses the cooking liquid from the crabs in the sauce. All I had was a can of Costco crab (very good wild stuff from, of all brands, Chicken of the Sea). About 1/4 cup of the ultra-concentrated shrimp broth was all that was needed. My taste buds are is still singing.
On a similar note, I have a batch of chicken poaching broth that is several years old. It’s been through maybe 40 or 50 cycles and gets better and better each time. I very, very gently poach the chicken until just done – no more. Full of flavor and juicy, it makes a great light meal.