Small Price, Big Flavors

…if you want a deep, rich flavor on a cool eve but dont feel much like cooking, you can shove this oh-so-easy-to-make classic on a back burner:

A thousand different names, a million different variations, all derived from ancient times, likely as soon as people learned to mix flour and liquid into a dough, roll it out, fry it, and sweeten it. Certainly a version was already well known in ancient Rome: frictilia. Apicius mentions them as a cheap and delicious street food passed out to people celebrating Saturnalia.

I love sandwiches. I really do. All kinds. Each of their differing forms around the world correspond perfectly to different places and moments: a quick selection of tramezzini (a form of art in some Italian cities,) maybe with asparagus and egg, ham and cheese, smoked salmon, on cool spring morning al fresco in a piazza… Read more: Sunday Sandwich: Eggplant and Roasted Ham

You get bored sometimes, even with things you like. Say, with music – that youtube listening list that you’ve heard one time too many, ‘…not today. It doesn’t…flick my bic.’ Or a walk on the same trail ‘…I know, it always changes, different under clouds instead of sun, during different seasons, or a different me.… Read more: Small Price, Big Flavors: Escaping Kitchen Boredom with Steve Machoquiet and a Garlic and Oil Pasta (with a deconstructed pork, bok choy and ginger ragout)

t’s late. It’s been a fairly busy day, your girl friend will be getting back about 20 minutes or so after you will, tired and a little stressed at the ongoings of the day. It’s your turn to cook and you really, really don’t feel like prepping a meal. What’s worse: you’re hungry, even ravenous. You want massive, mouth-filling, gut-fulfilling fair in a hurry. Pizza? Burgers? The deli on the corner?

…after plating in individual bowls, place one or two slices of the paper-thin lard onto the hot pasta twirls – the slices will melt into the sauce, adding an intense flavor. Or, as EZ might have said – a load of exquisite rubbish.

it’s a great, very cheap side dish for almost anything – meats, egg, some fishes even or as part of a single plate. Of course you can add onions or cheese – carefully – or flavor it with herbs to tatse but by and large the simpler, the better. Make sure you get good potatos though, which ever variety and from which ever side of the Rosti Ditch you use….

Only an essential, clean sauce can complete an elegant pasta dish as a purple-hued cloud can complete a glorious summer sunset. Not a vulgar sauce like, say, one made with Italian meatballs, those shiny, dirty round mounds of grease that sit glistening on the top of Little Italy restaurant displays calling out to passing Midwestern travelers like sirens to Odysseus’ crew. This dish is closer to the essence of pasta and for that reason I recommend you use only the finest ingredients, Martelli butterfly noodles, the most virgin of Tuscan olive oils, and free–range Connecticut chicken. (Avoid those of New Jersey, as they are often unclean. I know Hemingway thinks such differences are pretentious and without significance but he puts ketchup on his hotdogs. Ketchup. Hotdogs. ‘Nough said.)

4 of the top 10 things that guys, even more so heterosexual, don’t do naturally of their own free will are: 1) their nails; 2) shopping; 3) ironing… and; 4) dirty dishes, the later only it there isn’t any more space left in or around the kitchen sink. You know, those leaning tower constructs of stained, somewhat brownish plates, glasses and silverware that seem to defy gravity as they glisten under the lighting, testaments to the open and heat meals of days gone by?

Garlic Pasta Sonnet 116   Garlic Pasta Sonnet 116“And scorne not Garlicke like to some, that think / It onely makes men winke, and drinke, and stink.” Joannes De Mediolano, The Englishman’s Doctor, 1608   Garlic Pasta has become a motto for the recent revival of simple, good, healthy traditional cuisine. The recipe states right… Read more: Wednesday Will – Garlic Pasta Sonnet 116

Spread a thin layer of the fresh cheese over top. Now, spoon over the sauce – and it’s ready to go.

t’s nearly always a balance, almost a dance – an equilibrium, a playing, contrast and synchrony, surprise and familiarity. Cooking that is, organizing a plate, adjusting for salt and sweet, umami and creamy, crunch and mushy and heat and bite and…

…for more literary recipes: on sale – The Pasta Papers vl. 1 “…and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” A Supermarket in California Ingredients:Strong wordsStrong espresso*the authors asked Allen for a pasta recipe but he refused. I saw the best potential baristas of my generation destroyed by Starbucks, obese couch-potatoed elastic-banded,dragging… Read more: literary recipe: Allen Ginsburg’s Howling Espresso Pasta. With Mushrooms. (Rest in howling peace.)

  ….long sigh. Tough times, lots of people around Italy and elsewhere don’t have much cash, ‘no tengo dinero’, not in small part because a very few people have so much…. they don’t really know what to do with. Except waste it buying symbolic stuff absurdly priced from other rich people, you know, another 15… Read more: Small Price, Big Flavor: Penne with scampi without the scampi

by Susan Cook-Abdallah    “Freshly blows the wind homewards…” Tristan und Isolde act 1, sc. 1 Ingredients: For the Pasta: Barley Water Salt Schnapps For the Sauce: Bratwurst Wienersnichel Liverwurst Sour Kraut Beer Lots of Pork Lard Serves the German Homeland. Enough with light and delicate pastas cooked with wimpy vegetable sauces!  We must make… Read more: Pasta Noir – Happy Birthday Ricky: Wagner’s National German Pasta (with sausage and broccoli)

So, it appears a friend and I have started a bit of an adventure here on WP: food. In many of its forms. We’d like to know which meals you’d like us to articulate, based on what we’ve been making and eating. You choose between: 1) Square egg pasta ‘alla chitarra’ with zucchini and spiced… Read more: May meal quiz: Which cheap but full-flavored meal would you prefer?

Genius: very clever or original. Tiramisu is a genius Italic dessert. I challenge you to find a person, literally one, who doesn’t like it, or anyone who didn’t have a food-gasm the first time they tried a well-done Tiramisu made with the freshest Mascarpone. The word derives from Treviso, they way they say ‘lift me… Read more: Big Flavors, Small Price – Tiramisu

Welcome to our first column – Big Flavors, Small Price. It’s a rough time this year. For most of us, anyway. We’ve all sacrificed. Some of us have seen their living standards drop through the floor. I’m one of the ones that saw their living standards plummet. I mean… fall from a hillside view to… Read more: Big Flavors, Small Price – Risotto With Asparagus