Posts Tagged ‘pasta’

I haven’t done a recipe blog post in months, but I made this bowl of scrumptiousness the other night and couldn’t keep it to myself!

It’s a recipe from Andrew Zimmern in Food & Wine, and as soon as I read it, I knew it had to be Sunday dinner. This bolognese is layered, complex, luscious and indulgent. There are nuances of smokiness from the bacon, fruitiness from the wine and sweetness from the butternut squash. But what stands out, amazingly, is the delicate veal flavor.

My whole family was, quite simply, blown away. And it takes a lot to blow us away culinarily. They can’t wait for me to make it again, and when I do, I…

Category: Recipes

How I wish you could smell my house right now. There’s an enormous pot simmering away on the stove, and the aroma of pork, fennel and white wine is sneakily wafting around the corner into my office. It’s all savory and comfort-foody and yummy. And when I say an enormous pot of sauce, I mean I six-times’d (sextupled?) the recipe so in addition to feeding my gang, I could feed the freezer and have a bunch of those magical moments when there’s no ambition to make dinner — and then you open the freezer and see a container of this scrumptiousness sitting there and there are angels’ voices singing and the swirling freezer frost adds…

Category: Recipes

Every once in a while, I’m lucky enough to stumble upon a new recipe and know instantly that it’ll become part of our weekday dinner repertoire. This light, flavorful baked pasta — shells stuffed with ricotta, fontina, fennel and radicchio — is one of those recipes.

It had been staring at me temptingly, all cheesy and crusty, from the cover of Food & Wine, and by last week I could no longer resist. I sautéed fennel, radicchio and onions in a large pan while boiling up the jumbo shells, and then I stuffed them individually with a mixture of the sautéed veggies, fresh ricotta, shredded fontina cheese, eggs and parsley. While I prefer to make my…

Category: Recipes

A warm bowl of perfectly al dente pasta lightly coated with a rich sauce bursting with umami flavor, flecked with salty, crispy shards of pancetta, encircling a glistening egg yolk ready to spread a luscious creaminess throughout the dish…all whipped together in 20 minutes or less? Yup! That’s the insane beauty of carbonara.

Okay, if you really want to bring it down to its lowest common descriptor, I suppose it is bacon-egg-and-cheese pasta. But honestly, that would be like yelling, “Yo, LARRY!” across the room to the esteemed Sir Laurence Olivier. It’s oh, so much more. Superbly decadent. Sublimely fulfilling. Even though, legend has it, it was created as a hearty dish for Italian coal miners.

The

Category: Recipes

We stumbled upon this recipe on New Year’s Day six or seven years ago when we were lucky enough to have a bounty of luscious leftover caviar from a celebration the night before and were looking for a way to use it up (I know — what a deliriously happy dilemma!). We happened to have had the rest of the ingredients in the house — angel hair, lemon, butter, salt and white pepper — and within 10 minutes, a New Year’s Day tradition was born.

This dish could not be simpler, yummier or more festive and elegant, depending, of course, on whether you fall closer to Tom Hanks in Big or Christian Slater on Curb Your…

Category: Recipes

If macaroni and cheese conjures the vision of a blue box with a packet of powdered cheese that results in a big bowl of orange slop, be warned: this is not a dish for you. Mind you, I’ve eaten more than my share of the Krafted-in-a-food-lab version. Until, that is, I discovered the rapture of real macaroni and cheese.

Begging your pardon, but the Reiser princes have unanimously proclaimed the Lobster Mac & Cheese at Bobby Van’s to be the ne plus ultra of lobster mac & cheese. It’s at once crunchy, crispy, lusciously creamy, exquisitely cheesy, and it’s loaded with delightful plump chunks of fresh, sweet lobster. (I know…I’m bordering on food…

Category: Recipes

Okay, so it was spaghetti with shrimp scampi…but I have to tell you it was exceptional spaghetti and it made the dish especially mouthwatering.

This is one of our weekday standbys. I keep cleaned, top-quality IQF Texas Toros in the freezer, so the dish takes less than half an hour from start to finish, and it’s a cinch to pull together on late Little League nights or when I’m not in the mood to make anything complicated. I usually have the rest of the ingredients on hand in the fridge and pantry ““ pasta, garlic, butter, lemons, olive oil, parsley, salt and pepper ““ so it’s often a last-minute dish for us….

Category: Recipes

Pasta, pesto, and peas is a perfect party pleaser. (A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts!)

I swear the toughest thing about this recipe is waiting for the pasta to cool so you can toss it with the pesto puree.

First of all…pesto? Yum! And as easy as it is to whip up (Ina includes a recipe for homemade), I chose to save some time by buying fresh store-bought, since it was going to be blended up with chopped spinach, lemon juice and mayo anyway. Toasted pine nuts add a rich crunch to the dish, and what’s easier than using frozen peas? (I’m not a big fan of frozen veggies—save for peas, chopped spinach and…

Category: Recipes