I don’t know how it happened (or how it happens so often), but time yesterday kept quietly creeping by until 30 minutes before supper time, at which point I realized that I hadn’t even begun to think about what to make. Then, as usual, it immediately stopped creeping, got into the starting blocks, and took off like a shot.
Again as usual at times like those, my mind turned to pasta, but this time without the usual thoughts of homemade tomato sauce (after the pizza adventure last weekend, there’s none to be found in this kitchen). No: this time, I paid more attention to the bottle of milk in the refrigerator. I ran out to the corner vegetable kiosk and bought a yellow pepper, cherry tomatoes, and some fresh herbs, the things I’d need for pasta primavera with homemade besciamella. On the time-efficiency to boyfriend-satisfaction curve, this is one of the most successful suppers I’ve ever made, ranking right up there with drunken pasta.
The photo is, of course, from the morning after, when I was getting another batch for lunch ready from the leftover pasta, sauce, and vegetables. Unfortunately, there was no yellow pepper leftover, but I, as an ardent bell pepper-hater, think it looks just as appetizing without it.
Pasta primavera
Pasta primavera is traditionally made with no cream sauce except a soffritto of olive oil, onion, garlic, and Parmesan cheese at the beginning–and although I base it, as I do most things, on a soffritto of butter (or oil, if you like), onions, and garlic, I’ve chosen to use the besciamella instead of just Parmesan (and to add it at the end), because I love taking a relatively unhealthy dish and somehow making it even more unhealthy. Along the same lines, feel free to garnish with grated hard cheese, if it’ll make you happy.
To make it vegan, replace the butter with margarine or oil, replace the besciamella with your favorite not-cream sauce or just leave it out entirely, nix the sugar if you’re concerned about bone char, and check your wine to be sure it wasn’t filtered with animal-derived finings.
2 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tsp sugar
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 yellow pepper, chopped
250 g (frozen) broccoli, stems removed and chopped
1 cup dry white wine
500 g dry pasta, your choice of geometry, cooked until just tender
250 g fresh cherry tomatoes, washed and each chopped in half
1/2 c chives, chopped
1/4 c fresh dill, chopped
1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
5-6 springs fresh thyme, with the leaves stripped from the stems
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried basil
2-3 cups besciamella sauce
juice from 1/2 lemon
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
hot red pepper, to taste
Melt the butter over very low heat, and cook the onions with the sugar until translucent. Add the garlic and yellow pepper, and cook until fragrant. Add the broccoli, and cook until tender if you’re using fresh, or until thawed if you’re using frozen. Add the pasta, wine, cherry tomatoes, and spices, and cook until the liquid is gone. Add the remaining ingredients, give it a few healthy stirs until all’s combined, and serve hot with chilly white wine.
Besciamella
Besciamella is something like the French béchamel. Actually, it’s exactly like it. Wikipedia tells me that:
Auguste Escoffier’s recipe for béchamel consists of white roux, milk, optional veal, onions, thyme, butter, pepper, nutmeg, and salt.
Many chefs would now regard as authoritative the recipe of Auguste Escoffier presented in Saulnier’s Répertoire: “White roux moistened with milk, salt, onion stuck with clove, cook for 20 minutes”.
Well, I’ve never had the patience to make real roux in the oven, so I go with a butter-and-flour stovetop variant, and in the sauce, I hold the veal, onions, and thyme. There are no tricks here, just very low heat and frequent stirring and scraping.
1/4 cup butter
3 tbsp flour
500 mL milk
pinch nutmeg
pinch salt
pinch pepper
1/4 cup grated hard cheese
Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat, and add the flour. Stir until you get a thickish yellow paste, and add the milk very slowly. Stir until thickened (about ten minutes), and add the remaining ingredients.
Anyone who’s known me at any point in my life knows that my greatest love has always been pasta. It’s dependable and familiar (topped with, for example, homemade tomato sauce and grated cheese), hot and intriguing (crushed red pepper and olive oil), the starting point for so many wonderful adventures, and, most lovely of all when it’s done right, simple and chic and bound to impress.
When I found this recipe, courtesy of Gina DePalma at Serious Eats, I was so impressed by the idea that I just couldn’t stop thinking about it–then after having made my first batch about two weeks ago, it got even more intense, and still now, after having eaten my fourth plate of it this week, I can’t stop thinking about it. Last night I made two batches, the first with linguine, that I sucked down at record speed, and the second with tri-color farfalle, the only other pasta I had on the shelf, to last today. It turns out that the pasta keeps okay overnight, although the garlic flavor, of course, gets stronger and hides the parsley and the delicious raw wine flavor that you get by adding that splash at the end.
Drunken Pasta
The wine that I used this time, as Gina advises, was a dry red that I wouldn’t hesitate to drink but that was still on the less expensive side–around 160 roubles, or about $4.70 at the current rates. I adapted the recipe just a tiny bit, cutting down the amount of cooking liquid so that I could get away with using just one 0.75 L bottle of wine (I’ve also made it with just a little less than half a bottle to use, and even that seemed to work fine), reducing the amount of olive oil, and garnshing with fresh chives.
To make it vegan nix the butter, don’t garnish with cheese, and take care to choose a wine that’s not made with animal-derived finings.
0.75 L bottle of dry red wine, divided
0.75 L water
pinch of salt
1/2 kilogram thick pasta, like linguine
2 large or 4 small cloves garlic, chopped
2 tbsp butter
4 tbsp olive oil
1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
1/4 c fresh chives, sliced (optional)
1/4 c Parmesan cheese, grated (optional–I used Grana Padano instead)
Combine all but 1/2 cup of the wine with all of the water and the pinch of salt, and bring to a boil. Add the pasta, and cook until al dente (taste-test it, and when it’s tender but still tough to the teeth, it’s done–barring that, the infamous “wall-dente” test works okay enough with noodley pastas). While the pasta is cooking, melt the butter and olive oil over low heat in a saute pan large enough to contain the pasta. Add the garlic, and stir from time to time. The garlic should come to a sizzle and be aromatic, but not browned, just as the pasta is getting done. Add the 1/2 cup of wine to the saute pan, along with a splash (about a half-cup) of the pasta liquid. Scrape up any burned garlic from the bottom of the pan and turn the heat to medium. When the liquid is simmering, drain the pasta and add it, along with all of the parsley, to the saute pan. Stir constantly until all of the liquid is absorbed. Garnish with chives and grated cheese, and serve hot.
Yield: two portions
