It’s that time again, a new month has dawned and we have a little round-up of the last one. I’m finding that a lot of my focus in creating dishes for Casa SaltShaker seem to end up in the Pasta world. If I wasn’t already basically retired, I think I’d open a small restaurant that served up just soups, sandwiches, and pastas. They tend to be my favorite things to play with in the kitchen.
I have this thing about Blood sausage. I know a lot of people kind of go “eww” when they hear or think about it, and consider it something that’s just outside their experience. But you know, if you eat pretty much any kind of meat based sausage, you’re eating blood. If you eat meat, you’re eating blood. Even if the meat you eat is kosher, supposedly drained of blood, you’re eating blood. And yeah, watching the making of a blood sausage is pretty “eww” inducing, but once it’s cooked, there’s nothing that really stands out about a blood sausage other than its dark, rust-brown color. And they pop up in all sorts of cultures, from French boudin noir to English black pudding to Korean sundae to Tibetan gyurma to Spain and every one of its former colonial states’ morcilla. And more, those are just the ones that pop to mind at the moment.
This one’s been in development for awhile. Tortellini filled with a mix of morcilla sausage filling and a fresh goat cheese. Served up with roasted baby beet wedges and crispy beet leaf chips. The sauce is a mix of olive oil, lime juice, fruit vinegar, garlic, chili, anchovy, and green onion. I love this one, and based on diner feedback at both a dinner and a private lunch at which we featured this one, so did our guests.
I love braising meat and getting that tender, falling apart texture. And I love taking those classic, old-school Italian or French style recipes and infusing them with ingredients from other parts of the world that I’ve learned to use over the decades. This is a ragú of lamb shoulder that’s slowly cooked with red onions, lots of garlic, duenjang (which is basically the Korean version of miso), tomatoes, white wine, sesame oil, beef stock, and a blend of ground spices: chili, coriander, fenugreek, cumin, mint, pepper, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, cardamom, and mace. Yeah, that’s a lot of spices and it took some doing to come up with a blend that I really liked – it’s more or less based on an Indian lamb curry mix. The ragú cooks down for several hours in a dutch oven. I shredded the meat and then for serving, reheated it all with a little of the pasta water and tossed it with handrolled semolina pappardelle.
A sweet interlude, and obviously not a pasta. We actually had a really good pasta for this particular dinner – my take on the “classic” penne alla vodka, which I’ve written about, though here done with fettuccine, and which I made in both a regular version with bacon, and for one guest whom I found out more or less last minute was vegetarian, a mushroom version. But this cheesecake has been in the works for a bit, ever since I stumbled across a really delicious smoked blue cheese from, according to the cheese shop I bought it at, El Narcisiso, though I’ve been unable to find any mention of such a cheesemaker anywhere in Argentina. Here, I’ve incorporated it into a cheesecake – just enough to get that lightly funky blue cheese flavor and a good touch of the smokiness, mixed with our homemade cream cheese. Baked over a crushed cookie crust, topped with a thick, sticky, fig jam, chopped hazelnuts and almonds, and a couple of wedges of fresh figs. It works. Sometimes I find myself surprised in talking to guests – here they are traveling around the world, and they often have been to many more places than I have – and yet, two of the diners at the table had never seen nor had fresh figs before.
I’m going to put this one back to the drawing board. I do like it, but it needs a lot of tweaking. It didn’t come out the way it did in test runs. It’s a lot easier sometimes to make these things in small batches than larger ones, and introducing last minute touches sometimes causes unexpected results. So first off, these are lorighittas, a traditional double or triple twisted ring pasta from Sardinia. In my playing around with the idea, I colored them orange with carrot juice, and tossed them with a carrot fondue made by cooking down finely diced carrots in cream and marsala. They’re topped with calamari rings quickly sauteed with garlic and then tossed with a lemon verbena gremolata – the chopped herb, lemon zest, and black pepper. Here’s where things went a little awry – I happened across a bunch of purple carrots and thought – that’d make this dish a really pretty color. And, it does, to some extent. There are two issues with the color – first off, the carrots aren’t purple all the way through, they’ve got purple to a depth of about a quarter inch, and then it shifts to a vivid yellow with a hint of orange. So coloring the pasta with that came up with a sort of muddy purple color. The sauce stayed a nice vivid purple, interestingly, which is what’s coating the pasta. But then there’s a chemical reaction thing – the lemon zest, with that bit of citric acid, reacted with the purple color and you can see in spots where the sauce and/or pasta have come in contact with it – it turns blue-green. Okay, note to self, don’t use purple carrots like that again. I also made the lorighittas a bit too thick – again more of a presentation issue than anything. The dish was still delicious, it just needs work. To return one day, more likely in orange color.
Welcome to May!
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