Penne in cream of broccoli

This dish sort of embodies the way I think of Spring - fresh, delicate, and of course, very green!


I rarely have cream or milk in the house, so I don't make things like this very often. In fact, the only times I have cream are when I need it for some special dessert I'm making. As it happens, my aunt had requested last week that I re-bake the superbly scrumptious caramel cake from November's Daring Baker's Challenge for her birthday, and so I did have both cream and milk on hand (the cake requires a few spoonfuls of cream and a cup of milk).

This situation required some creative thinking on my part to figure out how to use the remaining cream. I used up a fair portion in a lovely kiwi strawberry mousse, but I still had more than enough for the cream of broccoli sauce, which only requires a couple spoonfuls. Ideally, you would use "panna di cucina" or cooking cream, but I don't know if you can get that here. Panna di cucina has less fat than heavy whipping cream, so it is more suitable for savory dishes where you just want a creamy sauce. Panna di cucina has about 21% fat, while heavy whipping cream is more like 35% fat. In order to achieve the right consistency, I mixed a few spoonfuls of heavy cream with a few spoonfuls of milk, which seemed to work fine.

Ingredients:
75 g. penne per person
1 bunch of fresh broccoli
About half a cup of cooking cream, or a mixture of half heavy cream + half whole milk
A couple gloves of garlic
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Pecorino sardo or romano

Wash the broccoli thoroughly and divide it into florets. Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add salt, and then add the broccoli. Let the broccoli cook about 10 minutes, then remove them with a slotted spoon, and let cool.

Put the penne right into the broccoli water to cook, adding more water or salt if necessary. Meanwhile, peel and crush the garlic cloves, and heat some olive oil in a large sauté pan.

When the olive oil is hot, add the garlic. Let cook a minute or so, and then add the broccoli. Let the broccoli cook about 5 minutes, then turn heat down to low, and add the cream/milk + cream mixture. Cover the pan, and let cook another few minutes. Remove cover, and mash up the broccoli with a potato masher. You can do this right in the pan (I love when I can make these things without using a food processor, as I do not have one). Add a generous amount of salt and pepper, cover and let simmer some more.

When the penne are done, drain them, add them to the cream of broccoli, and mix everything up well to coat the penne. Turn off heat, and spoon into serving bowls. Cover with a generous heaping of grated pecorino, and eat warm.

Penne with Spinach and Feta

It seems I post quite a few pasta recipes that involve penne. This is a bit odd, since I'm sure I eat far more spaghetti than penne. And besides spaghetti I actually have three favorite types of pasta asciutta - literally "dry pasta" (this is as opposed to pasta fresca, or "fresh pasta" which includes things like fettucine and also stuffed pasta - pasta ripiena - like ravioli and tortellini). Anyways, my three favorite types of pasta asciutta after spaghetti are penne, fusilli, and farfalle, so I'm not sure why only penne have made it up here so far, though I will try to correct this error in the future!


However, this particular recipe comes from a little cookbook I picked up in Italy called "Primi piatti di verdure" (vegetable entrées), and that recipe actually calls for sedanini, which are closer to penne than they are to fusilli or farfalle, so I consider myself justified in posting yet another penne recipe, though of course you can substitute other types of pasta if you prefer. Though I found the cookbook rather disappointing overall, there are a few stand-out recipes hidden in it, and this is definitely one of them. Though feta isn't normally a feature of Italian cooking, it works really well with this pasta dish, and I highly recommend you try it out!

You will need:
Penne - 75-100 g per person
About 250 g spinach
A small block of feta
A handful of hazelnuts
One medium-sized shallot
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Nutmeg

Though you can also use ricotta instead of feta, I really like the saltier addition of feta, which contrasts nicely with the hazelnut and nutmeg. Please also use real hazelnuts if you can, and not filberts, which I've found don't have anywhere near the same flavor. It's true that hazelnuts are absurdly expensive around here, but in my opinion it's worth it for the taste!

Wash and dry the spinach, removing any hard stem parts, and tear the leaves up, setting them aside in a large bowl. Chop/grind the hazelnuts into little bits and chop up the shallot.

In a large pot, bring some water to a boil. When it's boiling, salt it and add the penne. Heat some olive oil (butter in the original recipe) in a fairly large sauté pan. When the oil is hot add the shallot. After a minute or so, add the ground-up hazelnut. After another minute or so, add the spinach, in parts if necessary so that there's only one layer covering the pan. The recipe also says to add some of the cooking water from the pasta, which I invariably forget to do. I think it just makes everything more sauce-like, but I forgot this time and it was still fine.

Add salt, pepper, and nutmeg to the spinach and let cook, stirring frequently. After the spinach is fairly well-cooked, chop or crumble the feta and stir it in. Turn the heat to low and let everything cook another few minutes so that the feta melts, not forgetting to stir.

Drain the penne and add them to the spinach-feta mixture, mixing everything up until the penne are well coated with sauce. Turn off the heat and spoon the penne into your serving bowl. Serve warm!

Penne with Red Snapper, Tomatoes, and Capers

When it comes to cooking fish, my experience before tonight was just about zero. Apart from canned tuna, I don't think I had ever once prepared a dish that involved fish. It's not that I don't like fish, because I do, quite a bit. It's just that I have a strange aversion to dealing with any kind of raw animal flesh and so I end up eating almost all vegetarian meals when I cook for myself, though I'll happily eat meat that other people have prepared!

However, I have been going through Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" which I highly highly recommend to anyone who ever cooks or is at all interested in knowing what's going on in all that stuff you put in your mouth, and I just arrived at the fish section. Reading all about fish muscles and fish preparation made me quite curious (for some reason I find myself fascinated by all the descriptions of the chemical processes involved in the breakdown of muscle by heat). Then at the farmer's market this morning, I noticed a stand with some nice fresh-looking fish fillets. Since I wanted something easy to prepare, I decided this was perfect and, after peppering the fish vendor with questions about the different types of fish, I decided on a fillet of red snapper.

I had some San Marzano tomatoes I needed to use up, and I always like capers with fish, so after going through all sorts of fish recipes online, mixing them all up, and adding a few of my own personal touches, I came up with the following dish, which turned out quite nicely for a first fish-dish!

You will need:
1 fillet of red snapper (or other fish that cooks well in a pan)
80 g penne
4-5 San Marzano tomatoes (you can substitute other smaller tomatoes like cherry tomatoes here, in which case you should use about 10-12)
A couple spoonfuls of capers
1 onion
A couple cloves of garlic
Lemon juice
1/2 small glass of dry white wine
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Fresh parsley
Fresh basil

If you're using San Marzano tomatoes, begin by boiling them for about 30 seconds, running them under cold water, and then peeling and seeding them. Cut the remaining pulp into thin strips and set aside. If you're using something like cherry tomatoes, just cut them in half, leaving the peel intact.

Bring a large pot of water to boil for the pasta. While you're heating the water, chop up the onion and crush the cloves of garlic with your hand or the flat edge of a knife.

When the water starts to boil, salt it and add the penne, stirring a bit to make sure they don't stick. In a frying pan, start to heat the olive oil. While the oil is heating, take the red snapper fillet, rinse if necessary, and cover with lemon juice. Then chop it into small pieces.

Once the oil is hot enough to make a few water droplets spattered onto it sizzle, add the garlic. After about a minute, add the onion. When the onion has become tender and translucent, add the red snapper. Sprinkle salt and pepper over everything, and let cook a few minutes, stirring frequently.

Pour the white wine onto the snapper, and let it cook until all the wine has evaporated. Once the wine has evaporated, add the tomatoes and the capers and let cook a few more minutes, again stirring quite a bit.

Drain the penne, and quickly throw them onto the mix of snapper, tomatoes, and capers. Turn off the heat, stir everything up, and then chop or tear up the parsley and basil and sprinkle over everything. Give it all a good last stir, and serve piping hot!

Penne "alla Greca"

This is a wonderful pasta dish to make in the summer because it involves very little actual heating. Besides that, it's super-simple and soooooo good! Though the classic tomato sauce with vegetables will always be my favorite pasta dish, this one is definitely in the running for second place.



For one person, you will need:
75 g of penne or other short pasta
25-50 g of feta
10-12 cherry tomatoes
Half a medium-sized red bell pepper
One small red onion
A handful of kalamata olives
Olive oil
Juice of half a lemon
Salt & pepper
Dill (fresh is better, but dried is easier to find and it works just fine)
Mint (same as for the dill)

In the version pictured here, I didn't have any dill or mint on hand (this is from when I was Italy and dill is almost impossible to find there), so I used some fresh parsley which also worked nicely

Set some water to boil in a large pot. While you're waiting for the water to boil, chop the cherry tomatoes into halves or quarters if they're very large, and dice the pepper and the onion. Combine the cherry tomatoes with the pepper and onion in a bowl and drizzle with olive oil. Add the lemon juice, salt, pepper, dill, and mint, stir everything up, and then let sit.

Once the water has come to a boil, salt it, and add the penne. Then, pit the olives by crushing them under the flat side of a knife and chop them in half.

You should let the penne cook just until they are al dente, i.e., 'to the tooth', i.e., cooked through but still chewy and somewhat resistant to your teeth when you bite into them. Though with enough experience cooking various types of pasta, you can usually make a pretty good guess as to when the pasta has cooked just the right amount, the most foolproof way to get good al dente pasta is simply to test every so often by fishing one out and munching on it!

Once the penne are done, drain them, and then mix them into the pepper-onion-cherry tomato mix*. Add the olives, crumble the feta over everything and enjoy!

*If it's a really hot day, this pasta also works wonderfully well served cold - just run some cold water over the penne immediately after you drain them. I usually don't do this, but that's because I love the way the feta just melts in your mouth after it's come into contact with the warm pasta...