healthier, simple "pasta alla vodka"

Not really at all like pasta alla vodka in ingredients or method, this nonetheless is reminiscent of it. Victor made this up the other day when we didn't have much food in the house; it's amazingly creamy even though it has no cream. Wholesome and decadent? Sign me right up.

Linguine Cacio e Pepe, with Tomato
adapted from Smitten Kitchen by Victor

I made the sauce while my pasta cooked. It fits right into that amount of time (8-12 minutes, depending on your pasta), and you get to serve both the pasta and sauce immediately after they've finished cooking.

Pasta Ingredients:

1/2 pound spaghetti or linguini
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
3 ounces Pecorino Romano cheese
1 teaspoon finely ground black pepper

Sauce Ingredients:

1/2 tablespoon olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 twelve-ounce can diced, fire-roasted tomato (I used Muir Glen)

Pasta Directions:

Cook pasta in well-salted water to your al dente tastes in a large pot.  Drain pasta, reserving 3/4 cup of the cooking water.

Dry out your pot, then heat the olive oil over high heat until almost smoking. Carefully add drained pasta and 1/2 cup of reserved pasta water.

Add butter, cheese, and ground pepper, and toss together with tongs. Add more pasta water, cheese, pepper or salt to taste.

Sauce Directions:

Open the canned tomatoes now. You'll need them in a minute or two.

Heat the olive oil in a large non-stick skillet over medium-high heat. When the oil is up to temperature, add the diced garlic. Push the garlic around in the oil until it all pulls together into a little clump. There should be just enough oil there to keep all the little bits of garlic floating, basically shallow-frying in a little puddle.

When the garlic begins to brown visibly, add the entire can of diced tomatoes. There's a bunch of liquid in there, so it may splatter a bit. Stir the tomatoes and garlic together, then spread the mixture evenly across the skillet. Lower the heat to medium. I used a splatter guard, but it wasn't really necessary after the first big sizzle was over.

Let the tomato mixture cook until all of the visible pools of liquid have cooked off, 8-10 minutes. If the skillet begins to show through while there's still liquid in the pan, stir and spread the mixture again. When most of the liquid is gone, you'll have something that looks a bit like chunky tomato jam (it's not jam, though, because there's no sugar in there).

Serving:

Serve pasta, sprinkling with reserved cheese and an extra grind or two of black pepper. Add a generous ladle of the tomato sauce on the side.

When I made this recipe, we both ended up mixing the pasta and sauce together. The result was a pinkish and creamy sauce that was remarkably like a vodka sauce. That makes some sense, because it's got a similar list of ingredients (cheese, fat, tomato). But, there's no alcohol and much less fat here. What are the vodka and cream really for, then? The cream is obvious - rich and sweet. The vodka is supposed to develop tomato flavor. We got a similarly deep, sweet sauce by using canned fire-roasted tomatoes and cooking them down in their own liquid. Take that, fattening restaurant food! It's like Cook's Illustrated up in here! Except that I got this result by accident, and I've only done it once, so it's possible that it was a total fluke.

Kitchen Experiment: Pizza

For some reason, the fact that we made pizza last night completely blew me away. It worked! The smoke alarms didn't go off! And it was not just edible, but extremely tasty. I used the pizza method from Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day, which calls for using one of their bread recipes (I used my usual half whole wheat version of their boule dough, though next time I'll go ahead and make the suggested olive oil focaccia dough).

Crank the oven up as high as it'll go - the new oven in our apartment continues to be a real workhorse: it not only goes up to 550F (many ovens top out at 500F) but it didn't seem at all damaged by the experience (a friend's oven practically melted at its top temperature... she needed to replace all the plastic knobs afterward). Let heat for at least 20 minutes. While the oven's preheating, prepare your ingredients (I used fresh farmer's market mozzarella, some left-over tomato sauce (drained of all juice over a fine sieve), and a puree of fresh basil and black olives). Allow to cool a little before serving, or the cheese will slide right off!

Using flour to prevent sticking, roll out the dough to about a 1/8" thickness. Take it slow - the dough will relax as you go, but it can take several minutes between expansions. Spray a cooking sheet or pizza crisper (we have one of these) with non-stick-spray-with-flour stuff. Once your pizza dough is sufficiently thin, roll it around your rolling pin to transfer it to the prepared pizza crisper (just like you would to move pie dough).

I spread out the basil/black olive mixture all over the dough and then spread the tomato sauce on top of that. Finally, rough rounds of mozzarella top of the whole thing. Get it into the oven ASAP and cook for 8-15 minutes (it pays to keep a close eye on pizza, as there's a fine line between lightly-browned-but-crisp and blackened at 550 degrees).

Kitchen Experiments: Pickle Edition, Update

My 9-day pickles turned out really, really well. I finally canned them last night, and there were just four pickles that didn't fit into the jars. They were delicious. I'm not quite sure what texture they should ideally have, so I don't know if they were the *perfect* pickles or not, but I'm definitely looking forward to eating the ones I canned.

That said, it's a lot of work for just four pints of pickles. There's not a lot of hands-on time, but having a daily task for over a week was a little much. If I don't find another sweet pickle recipe I like as well, I'll double or triple the batch next time to get more bang for my canning buck. I feel like a basic bread-n-butter pickle recipe shouldn't be too hard to find, but we'll see.

ETA: I just realised that my old post didn't have the recipe in it. Here it is:

Nine-Day Icicle Pickles
adapted from Small-Batch Preserving

• 2 quarts pickling cucumbers
• 4 C boiling water
• 1/2 C pickling salt
• 2 C white vinegar
• 3 C sugar, divided
• 1 Tbsp pickling spice

Day 1: Cut a thin slice from the ends of each cucumber, then cut into length-wise quarters. Cut each quarter in half. (You'll end up with little half-spear pickles.) Place in a large non-reactive container (I used the pot part of a spaghetti pot). Combine boiling water and salt; pour over cucumbers. Place something on the cukes to keep them submerged (I used the strainer insert from the spaghetti pot).
Days 2-3: Stir once a day.
Days 4-5: On both days, drain the cukes, discarding liquid. Cover them with fresh boiling water.
Day 6: Prepare a brine: combine vinegar and 1.5 C of the sugar in a non-reactive saucepan. Put the pickling spice into a large tea ball or tie in cheesecloth; add to pan. Bring to a full boil over high heat. Drain the cukes, discarding liquid. Cover with boiling brine. (You can throw out the spices at this point.)
Days 7-8: On both days, drain the brine into a large saucepan over high heat. Add 1/2 C sugar and bring to a boil. Pour over the pickles.
Day 9: Once again, drain the brine into a large saucepan over high heat. Add 1/2 C sugar and bring to a boil. Then, pack the pickles into your hot & sanitized canning jars. Pour the hot brine over the pickles, leaving 1/2" headspace. Process 10 min in a boiling water canner.

yield: about 4 pint jars

Kitchen Experiments: Pickle Edition

I've committed to having in-process cucumbers on my kitchen counter for the next week and a half. I'm making "Nine-Day Icicle Pickles." It's a little like having a (very boring) pet: give it a stir every day, and once in a while you clean up after it and add something to it. Not sure how it'll turn out - I will post the recipe once I know it's not a complete dud.