Veggie Tourtière

I don't know whether I'm actually allowed to call this dish tourtière, but I made it working largely from a tourtière recipe, so I figure the name fits. Recipe for pie crust still forthcoming.

1/2 pound mushrooms, chopped finely

1 medium onion, chopped finely

1 cup frozen corn

2 tbsp butter

Salt and pepper

2 large potatoes, mashed

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon allspice

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

Pastry for 1 two-crust, nine-inch pie

Sauté the onions and mushrooms butter. Add to the mashed potatoes, along with the corn, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. Cook on low heat until warm, adding water if necessary to keep it moist. Pour into pie shell, cover with pastry, and bake at 375 degrees for about an hour or until brown.

Tourtière

This is the recipe that Maman sent me about a year ago, and it works fairly well. I subbed in a pound of ground pork and a pound of meat loaf mix last night. I suspect that the actual proportions of the meat has very little to do with the success of the dish, though if the meat you use is too lean, you may have some issues with dryness. My advice is to keep a can of chicken broth on-hand to toss in if things start looking too dry, but you probably won't need it. Recipe for pie crust forthcoming.

1 1/2 pounds ground pork

1/2 pounds ground beef

1 medium onion, chopped finely

Salt and pepper

2 large potatoes, mashed

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon allspice

1/4 teaspoon cloves

Pastry for 1 two-crust, nine-inch pie

Cook the meats in their own juices until they're a uniform grey color. Don't brown the meat. Add the onion, salt, and pepper. Simmer on low heat until the onion starts to look soft and cooked. Maman's recipe says one hour, but I've found that this is overkill. Ten to fifteen minutes should be plenty. Add the potatoes to the meat and add cinnamon, allspice, and ground cloves.

Allow to simmer, covered, on low heat for about half an hour, stirring occasionally to avoid burning. (If it looks like it's getting unpleasantly dry, add some chicken broth, but not too much or the crust will sog.) Note: I used this half hour to start the pie pastry. Making the pastry takes more than half an hour, but you can use the extra time to let your filling cool a bit so it will be easier to put into the pie shell.

Pour the filling into the pie shell, cover with pastry, and heat in 375° oven for 1 hour or until brown.

Clam Shaush Pashta

Dudes! This is actually my recipe!

OK, so out in the real world, its Linguine con Vongole, and it's supposed to be made with genuine clams. You have to deal with the shells, and drain out all the sand, and all that. Thank you, I'll have the nice people at the restaurant do that, most of the time.

Or, at the other extreme -- and it's not like there's much in between -- it's a can of Snow's clams with the packing juices and "1/4 teaspoon dried parsley". And maybe some cream on the odd theory that a "white clam sauce" must require it.

So I'm going to be snotty and plebeian at the same time here. Canned clams, but real ingredients. No sand, but actual preparation. There is a middle ground where you buy cooked (maybe frozen) clam meat at your local shellfish purveyor, but unless you live in Oakland or your Trader Joe's happens to have it, go with the can.

If you've got a bigger crowd, you can stretch the same sauce over a pound of pasta. If you've got a really really big crowd, start doubling up on the cans of clams and bottles of juice, until you get to such a huge crowd that you need those giant cans (clams and juice both) that are weirdly labeled something like "#2". Just keep the proportions roughly correct, and remember that you'll need a HUGE pot to boil the pasta in and a very large pot just for the sauce.

3/4 lb. pasta
2 tbsp. olive oil
2-3 anchovies, mashed
2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
A few shakes dried red pepper flakes
1/2 cup white wine
1/2 tsp. dried basil
1 8-oz bottle clam juice
1 10-oz. can whole baby clams (I use Geisha)
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, chopped
1/8 cup fresh parsley, chopped
Grated Parmesan or Asiago cheese (optional)

I've put pasta first in the ingredients because if you use some really gnarly thick pasta, you'll have to get it going before anything else; on the other hand, if you use capellini (and this dish does work with capellini), you need to throw it in at the very last minute, when the sauce is all but done. Anyway, boil the water first. You never know; someone might have a baby.

Chop/mash the anchovies and pop them into a skillet (9 in. or so). Press on them with a wooden spoon or silicone spatula to flatten them out. Then add the olive oil and turn the heat on low while you prepare the other ingredients.

When the anchovies have pretty completely dissolved into the oil, add the garlic and turn the heat up a little. Then just keep stirring until the garlic smells cooked instead of raw. It will look a distinctly awful greyish-brown at this point.

Add the wine and turn the heat up to a full boil. Add the dried basil and the pepper flakes. Stir regularly. You're ready to move on when enough of the wine liquid has boiled off so that it's thick and soupy. Careful: if you turn your back on it for two minutes at this point the remaining liquid will boil off and you'll have burnt crap at the bottom of your skillet and be stuck with takeout Chinese.

Add the clam juice and about a third of the fresh basil. Keep the heat high, stirring until you get back to the soupy appearance again. At this point you can add pasta cooking water (don't forget to scald yourself pulling it out of the cooking pasta) to thin the sauce and then boil down more. This cycle can go on for hours if you have a thick pasta that requires long boiling; make sure you have a friend check that you haven't just gone into a coma.

When the pasta is within about three minutes of being done (for capellini, about two minutes before you put it in), add the clams and the second third of basil. Keep the heat high and add water as necessary.

Drain the pasta (but do not rinse) and return it to the pot. Now, if you are confident that the amount of sauce matches the pasta exactly, add the sauce to the pasta along with the remaining basil; otherwise, dress the pasta with a little olive oil, add the remaining basil to the sauce, and get everyone to table. (And turn the burner under the sauce off!)

Serve with parsley and optional cheese sprinkled over the top.

If you find you have too little sauce, you can add a little more pasta water and boil vigorously for a minute. This even works with the dregs of the sauce, maybe adding a little more olive oil as well.

Other optional additions: olives, capers, cheese in the sauce. You can add a tablespoon or so of butter to get a slightly thicker and richer sauce. Earlier (about when you add the clams), some claim a tablespoon or two of vodka smooths the sauce out, as long as you boil it enough to cook away the hard alcohol. If you must add vodka, I think it is probably better to add it to the guests rather than the sauce, but whatever.

Pasta with Feta Cheese and Cherry Tomatoes

This is from...well, what? It's called Pasta, the publisher is Hermes House, which is an imprint of Anness Publishing in London, and Jeni Wright is listed as the Contributing Editor. It's a wonderful collection of pasta recipes. But good luck finding it.

The Anness Publishing website says that Hermes is the imprint "...for non-trade sales, promotional sales and customised publishing for major customers" and assures us that "...products can seldom be supplied from stock..." This is the publisher promising you can't get it, let alone Amazon or Alibris.

Your best bet appears to be to time-travel to 2006 or so, when it was on the shelf at Pegasus Books in downtown Berkeley, and buy the copy before I did, thereby causing a rift in the space-time continuum. Or at least erasing this blog post.

Spaghetti (all quantities negotiable, see below)
2 tbsp. olive oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
8-12 cherry tomatoes, halved
pinch nutmeg, optional
3-6 oz. feta cheese
1-2 tbsp. chopped fresh basil
4-8 pitted and halved Kalamata olives

For this recipe, everything is up for grabs. Cherry tomatoes vary in size and juiciness, and you rarely can just go buy 8, as the original recipe suggests. The original recipe calls for 3 oz. of pasta, but I've found this much sauce will easily serve for twice that much. And feta cheese also comes in non-negotiable discrete hunks. I suggest you see which of these limitations affects you, and just try to adjust everything else.

Heat the olive oil, and then cook but do not brown the garlic (a minute or so). Add the halved cherry tomatoes and cook on fairly high heat for a minute or so. You want the cherry tomatoes to wilt and give up some of their juice. At this point you can mix with cooked and drained spaghetti, stirring in the feta, basil, and optional nutmeg (I'm not a fan) afterwards, or you can add the cheese and basil and cook another minute. If it doesn't look saucy enough, add a few tablespoons of the reserved pasta cooking water (you did reserve some pasta cooking water, didn't you? Don't you always reserve some of the pasta cooking water?), and serve with the pasta. Olives scattered on top of each serving, maybe with a little more chopped basil and grated Parmesan or Asiago if you're a real cheese nut.

If you cook this too long with the feta cheese, it will disintegrate and you'll have sort of a cheese sauce dish. It's not bad, but I like it better with the discrete chunks of feta.

Paul's Favorite (Pasta w/ Salami & Summer Squash)

This is another recipe from the late Jeff Smith, the Feudal Frugal Gourmet. I'll start with something very close to his original and then discuss modifications.

2 tbsp. olive oil
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced or minced
2 small summer squash (zucchini, crookneck, etc.), cut into matchsticks
1/4 lb. dry-cured Italian salami, cut into matchsticks
1 tbsp. capers, drained and chopped
1/2 cup cream
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 lb. fettucine or other pasta, cooked
Grated parmesan, asiago, or other hard cheese

Try to get a decent Italian salami (it seems to be correlated with spelling it "salame", if that helps). In the Bay Area, Gallo, Molinari, and Columbus all sell "chubs", the stick of salami wrapped in some kind of paper and covered with a gray-white moldy substance. Elsewhere in the country, your mileage may vary. If you are desperate, you can cut prepared salami slices for this, but the result is a lot greasier. If you can only find German salami, abandon all hope and look at the variations below.

Heat the olive oil and saute the garlic in it just briefly. enough to be able to smell the cooked garlic, not so much as to brown it. Add the summer squash and saute, stirring regularly, until nearly tender, under 3 minutes. Add the salami and capers and some pepper, and stir for another minute at most. Add the cream and simmer until the sauce is reduced to your taste. Serve over the pasta, with the grated cheese on the side.

This makes a lot of sauce for 1/2 lb. of pasta; I routinely made this much -- maybe adding another squash and a little more cream -- to serve with a full pound of pasta. You can stretch the sauce by simply adding more cream; you may have to if you reduce it too far. This can be a vegetarian dish if you replace the salami with another squash or two.

For a slightly more upscale version, use 2-4 oz. of pancetta instead of salami; chop the pancetta finely and start off by cooking it in the pan on low until it is browned and the fat is rendered. Then remove the pancetta and use the fat, with olive oil added only as necessary, and proceed with the dish. Put the browned pancetta bits back in with the capers.