Ragù with rigatoni v2.0

In our last post I had talked about the ragù with rigatoni I'd made with beef instead of lamb.  I recently tried making it again with some of our modifications.  The results were a mixed bag of success: not quite as tasty, but some of the new techniques can be incorporated into the next iteration.

• We stuck with beef, mostly because in this area, it's easier to buy beef than lamb.
• I wanted to try making this with an Italian wine rather than a French wine.  Thanks to Wines and More Rhode Island (right next to Whole Foods!), we got a wine from the Campania region.  I actually ended up liking the French wine better, both on its own and in the dish (but see the caveat in the next point), though I do believe that we need a bigger sample size on this one.  The Italian red we used was a little more dry than the Rhône wine we'd gotten the first time.
• Instead of using the 1 cup of canned whole tomatoes + 1 cup of the juices, I used a 14 oz. can of diced tomatoes.  This was definitely not a solution.  The whole tomatoes are not canned in additional tomato juice; it's just whatever juices come from the tomatoes themselves.  Diced tomatoes, I have learned, are canned with additional juice added, so the ragù was much more acidic than version 1.0.  This made the dish overly tomato-y and combined with the wine we used, it didn't seem quite as complex of a flavour as the first ragù we made.  Most of the spices were drowned out.
• The recipe called for a cup and a half of chicken stock, which I had felt was too much, so for this iteration I reduced it to 1 cup.  Unfortunately, my ill-fated decision to use the diced tomatoes meant that there was still way too much liquid in the pot; I still had to boil the sauce uncovered for about 45 minutes to get it to reduce a bit.
• I greatly reduced the cumin and threw in a pinch of nutmeg along with a bay leaf, but as noted previously, the final dish was mostly a tomato sauce with some beef in it and practically no spices.  Next time I'll keep the proportions I used for this attempt.

So, I suppose this is what learning to cook is all about, right?  Trial and error, modifying the recipe a bit, then refining it some more?  That's what I keep telling myself, at least.

The fantastic thing about cooking with wine?  You can drink while cooking.

The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (2013), p. 148-149

Writeup background noise: Mike and Mike simulcast on ESPN2.

Lamb ragù with rigatoni (var. beef)

In an effort to diversify our recipe repertoire, I purchased The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (after having tested some recipes from the library's copy, of course).  We've had success with a few of its recipes, but then I started to notice that we were only making those few dishes.  So we decided to make something different: lamb ragù with rigatoni.

We quickly discovered that the Foxborough Trader Joe's (right next to Gillette Stadium!!) doesn't carry ground lamb, so we bought beef instead, and rather hilariously, we didn't even buy ground beef (personal preference).  I realize this may have changed the final product rather a lot.*  But they had everything else we needed, including a bottle of inexpensive but quality red wine.  Massachusetts grocery stores >> Rhode Island grocery stores.

This turned out to be a very tasty red; it was a lot smoother than many other reds (which I prefer).  Trader Joe's FTW!

From a cursory read-through of the recipe, I knew that this one would take rather a while: definitely a weekend meal despite the cookbook author claiming that it could be done on a weeknight ("It cooks in 45 minutes!" for me means "You will be chopping things for 30 minutes, THEN cooking for 45 minutes!").  But even so, we started chopping things around 5:30 and didn't eat until just past 7.  Didn't budget the time well on that one.

Once we got the stove going, the sauce looked great.  Beef, onions, celery, carrots: deglazed with some red wine, this was starting to look more like a French beef stew than an Italian pasta sauce (though I have since learned that this is the traditional method for preparing a ragù alla bolognese).

I'd added the wine a few minutes prior to taking the photo; it was already tasty at this point.

Then the recipe told us to add 1 cup of canned whole tomatoes + 1/2 cup of the juices, then a cup and a half of chicken stock, followed by a covered simmer for 45 minutes.  This made the sauce look more like a soup, so I left the pot uncovered for the 45 minutes.  This thickened the sauce, but I would still reduce the amount of chicken stock to 1 cup at most and simmer with the lid on.

The ragù just after adding the tomatoes, juice, and broth.  Soup, or sauce for pasta?

The ragù after trying to get it to reduce.

The finished product was incredibly tasty even though we hadn't followed the original recipe to the letter.  It was not overly tomato-y; there were enough other flavors like rosemary, bay leaf, thyme, and cumin that no single flavour dominated the dish, and the carrots added just a bit of sweetness.  If anything, I would swap out the cumin (the cookbook author loves that cumin) for a pinch of nutmeg instead, but that is just my personal preference.

This is definitely something we would make again, but only on weekends unless I can improve my knife skills** enough to make this on a weeknight.  I'd like to see what it would taste like with the original main ingredient, but this beef variation was excellent.

A recipe to keep!  We made this with rigatoni bought from Trader Joe's.  It's somehow thicker than the Barilla or Mueller's rigatoni and stood up well to the chunky sauce.

The Dinnertime Survival Cookbook (2013), p. 148-149

*This is, in fact, reminiscent of a recent experience at a local Szechwan restaurant.  Our party wanted to order "Chinese broccoli with chicken".  Our waiter kindly let us know, though, that the restaurant didn't have any Chinese broccoli that evening; moreover, because of a printing error, it wasn't broccoli in the dish, it was cauliflower; and then it wasn't chicken, but pork.  Cauliflower with pork?  Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Chinese broccoli with chicken!

**I have almost, almost resisted the urge to use the word "sharpen" in relation to improving my knife skills.

Round and round pasta

We saw this pasta recipe on an episode of Giada at Home and it looked like a good springtime meal.  It turned out to be an interesting mashup of flavours and included our new favourite summer produce: zucchini and summer squash.  It also gave us an excuse to buy mascarpone.

Our notes:

• This recipe took a lot of time to prepare: cooking, cooling, and slicing sausages; slicing shallots; slicing carrots; slicing zucchini and summer squash; slicing tomatoes; mixing the dressing.  The given prep time of 10 minutes seems a bit on the optimistic side, though I suppose once everything is chopped the actual cooking doesn't take too long.
• I had cooked the sausage long before Dom got home so that it would have enough time to cool.  This saved time later, but it's my opinion that this recipe is not for those who work full time.  Maybe on weekends or something but definitely not for a weekday.
• Because we had only decided to make this earlier that day, the sausages were still frozen.  I cooked them on low heat in a covered skillet with about 1/2" of water, and kept checking on them for 15-20 minutes.  Worked great.
• Even with "medium" zucchini, 1/2" slices seemed rather hefty.  Though it would destroy the aesthetic of having all round items in the dish, I'd probably cut each piece of zucchini in half or quarters to get bite-sized pieces.  Either that or buy tiny zucchini.  (Side note: the photograph at the recipe's webpage has zucchini slices about the same size around as the pasta, and not as thick.  This was NOT reflected in the recipe's numbers.)
• I would use more than a 1/4 cup of orange juice for the cooked zucchini.  This barely covered the bottom of the pan and there wasn't a whole lot left after the "cook until the juice thickens" step.  Yes, I know it doesn't say "reduce" so I kept vigilant watch over it.
• The recipe calls for rotelle (wagon wheels), but I bought ditalini as our local Kroger doesn't have rotelle.  I always forget just how much volume a pound of ditalini takes up versus a pound of a larger pasta, and mixing together all of the ingredients was a bit dicey even in the pasta serving bowl that we have.  Guess we should just get penne next time if we don't have time to hunt down rotelle--the sauce-to-pasta ratio would probably be a little better with larger pasta.
• Perhaps I didn't allow enough time for the mascarpone to come to room temperature, but there was no way that stuff was going to be whisked, much less "poured" over the finished pasta.  However, the 'dressing', as it were, of mascarpone, lemon juice, and salt, was really quite delicious (once I worked it into the pasta) and provided a nice salty-and-sour contrast to the hint of orange juice that the zucchini had been cooked in.  We actually cut down the amount of salt in the dressing to about 1/2 teaspoon as a full teaspoon seemed excessive.
• Speaking of mascarpone, hearing someone say it "mars-ca-pone", in the same way that people pronounce my name as "Carolyn", sort of irritates me.  (It's closer to "mas-car-pone-eh", and my name is not "Carolyn" in the same sense that it isn't "Marie" or "Jordan".)  Since I've learned over the years that no one likes a know-it-all and since this really isn't a big deal in any case, I usually just brush it off and ignore the momentary and slight rise in blood pressure.  So to save myself a little hypertension, whenever someone pronounces it "mars-ca-pone", I'll just pretend that they're referring to that rum-running Capone family of Mars.  They've got an in with Starfleet, you know.

So all in all, this was a relatively labour-intensive dinner and it's not a good hot-weather dish only in that it requires three different uses of the stove.  However, it was very tasty and the end result was a not-too-heavy springtime dinner that we'll probably end up making again sometime--it'd be a great make-ahead dish as the flavours get better with a little time.

Avocados and pasta: a winning combination

Pasta all'amatriciana...all'americana

In a quest to try new pasta recipes I found one for pasta all'amatriciana, typically a tomato-based sauce with pancetta and pecorino cheese.  While grocery shopping yesterday, we decided to make this for dinner and consequently we had to substitute for items not commonly found at Meijer stores since we didn't want to have to make another stop on the way home.  Thus we called it: pasta all'amatriciana...all'americana.  It was still quite delicious but probably not anything like traditional.

Our notes:

• Meijer does not carry pancetta which is hardly a surprise.  Thus we used both Canadian bacon and regular bacon as a substitute (though if it had been up to me, I would have skipped the Canadian bacon and only used regular bacon...).
• Meijer also does not have bucatini pasta (again, not a surprise).  Linguine worked fine.
• The recipe called for a can of plum tomatoes which would then be run through a food mill.  Not owning a food mill, we opted for a can of crushed tomatoes.  Our dish looked much like the photo from the recipe's original site so this was probably all right.
• The addition of a very small quantity of baking soda (<1/8 tsp.) near the end of cooking reduces the acid in the sauce nicely without much affecting the overall taste.
• Red pepper flakes are not as inexpensive as you might think given that every single pizza joint has a jar of them on every table.
• We used closer to 1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes; even I think I could have put in a few more to make it a bit spicier.
• A bit of black pepper made a fine addition to the sauce.
• BelGioioso Romano cheese was perfectly serviceable.

Verdict: a recipe to try again, though with a little more planning next time around in order to get the traditional ingredients.  What we made was delicious already but presumably with the actual ingredients called for it would be even better.

An American interpretation.

Various varieties of carbohydrates.

A busy several days as you get not one, not two, but three different foods with this one post.  The value!

First, Dom made a batch of fresh pasta using our pasta maker, a snazzy drying rack that we'd gotten as a wedding present, and the Joy of Cooking recipe.  (I was busy being all professional with Adobe Illustrator which is why I wasn't helping at all.)  We'd only made fresh pasta once before, but just comparing the drying rack to having sheets and sheets of waxed paper with pasta all over the countertops and dining table, I'd say the drying rack wins by a lot.  The pasta was dry after 24 hours, though that may also be influenced by making pasta on a dry winter evening versus making pasta on a humid May evening.

The pasta turned out delicious, but much lighter than we had expected it to be.  Perhaps something to do with the drying process, or the use of the new stand mixer to mix the ingredients together...it looks like we need a larger sample size and a more rigorous experimental design.

Direct from Italy.

Second, we made pancakes using Greek yogurt because the carton of Chobani I'd picked up at the store had a recipe on the side (and, perhaps more importantly, a photo of a stack of pancakes).  The batter was intensely think and made pancakes roughly 3/8" high.  Flavor was good especially with the addition of a few blueberries, but as both of us prefer thinner pancakes made with milk rather than thicker pancakes made with buttermilk or yogurt, we will most likely not be using this recipe in the future.  Not to mention that these leftovers were not as delicious for subsequent breakfasts as compared to those made with milk-only recipes.

The griddle was an excellent registry item.

Lastly, and representing the largest time commitment of all three of these projects, I decided to make sakura mochi: red bean paste, sticky rice, an association (in my mind, at least) with cherries, and a lovely pink colour?  Sold.

No Japanese ancestry?  No problem for Google.  I loosely adapted a recipe I'd found after multiple searches and ended up using one that required making your own bean paste.  I found that, while soaking beans for 18 hours is less than ideal (see the red beans and rice experiment below), soaking them for 5 hours is also less than ideal; I ended up cooking with a ratio of 1 cup of beans to 3 1/2 cups of water (about 1 1/2 cups more water than called for in the recipe), and the paste turned out fine.

The rice traditionally has no actual cherry flavouring in it, though it can be coloured pink.  Because I wanted both, I cooked the rice with half a cup of tart cherry juice along with the sugar and water.  It worked like a charm.  I used plastic wrap to shape these so that the rice wouldn't just end up on me and managed to make nine more-or-less rounded sakura mochi, minus the pickled cherry leaf.

Red bean paste on the left and pink, cherry-flavoured rice on the right.  I'm so Asian.

The lovely pink colour seems to have come out best in this photo.  That's probably too much red bean paste for the amount of rice, at least for how I had been making them, but I think this was the first one I assembled.

They were delicious fresh, but they were even better after a day in a Ziploc container (no joke).

So, while these were not what you'd get if you were in Japan for Hinamatsuri, it was still a fun experiment.  Oddly, these seem to have gotten better with a few days' age; peak awesomeness was reached the second day after making these, after which the rice finally became a little dried out (though still edible).  Packing these four to a Ziploc container separated with waxed paper may have helped keep them moist for the few days after making them.  Definitely a keeper of a recipe.


Pasta recipe: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 324