Dairy

If you happen to have some meatballs and sugo left over from the recipe on page 146, here’s a simple baked dish that will put them to good use. Just toss them with cooked cavatappi—spiral pastas that do look like corkscrews—and cheeses, then bake. You can also bake this in a mold and turn it out, as a lovely golden torta. Press the filling to fit into a 10-cup Bundt pan or soufflé dish, generously buttered and coated with bread crumbs. Sprinkle bread crumbs and grated cheese on the top (which will become the bottom), and bake at 400° until the edges are golden.

You can make this colorful and fresh-tasting dish anytime with a batch of Twenty-Minute Marinara Sauce and cherry or grape tomatoes, which are in the market almost year-round and often are sweeter than large tomatoes. This is one baked dish in which I use fresh mozzarella in the filling. I love its texture and fresh taste in uncooked or quick cooked pastas, and these can be lost in long cooking. Buy small whole mozzarella balls, an inch in diameter, if you can. Sometimes they are called bocconcini, little mouthfuls, but in my neighborhood the supermarket calls them ciliegine, little cherries. Toss them whole with the hot pasta so they keep their integrity in the baking dish—you don’t want them to melt away like shredded mozzarella on top.

This delicate and quite simple ravioli is a lovely way to enjoy the affinity of pear and cheese. The filling is a lively blend of shredded ripe pear, shredded 3- to-6-months-aged Pecorino Romano (it should be semisoft), and mascarpone—just stirred together at the last moment.

This is a simple, pure version of cheese ravioli, without the eggs that are usually added to firm up the filling. Use fresh whole-milk ricotta with large curds and drain it thoroughly to get the best consistency. With creamy fillings such as this one, I feel that a slightly thicker dough provides more texture and is preferable to a very thin dough. If you roll your dough strips to get eighteen or twenty ravioli—following the guidelines below—that’s better than trying to stretch them to get twenty-four. All you need is enough sauce to coat the ravioli lightly. So those small portions of sauces you have saved in the freezer might be just enough to dress a batch.

Marinara is my quintessential anytime tomato sauce. I can start it when the pasta water goes on the stove and it will be ready when the pasta is just cooked. Yet, in its short cooking time, it develops such fine flavor and pleasing consistency that you may well want to make a double batch—using some right away and freezing the rest for suppers to come. The beauty of this marinara sauce is that it has a freshness, acidity, and simplicity of taste, in contrast to the complexity and mellowness of the long-cooking tomato sauce that follows. This recipe for marinara includes lots of fresh basil, which I keep in the house at all times, now that it is available in local supermarkets year-round. I cook a whole basil stalk (or a handful of big sprigs with many leaves attached) submerged in the tomatoes to get all the herb flavor. Then I remove these and finish the sauce and pasta with fresh shredded leaves, giving it another layer of fresh-basil taste. (If you are freezing some of the sauce, by the way, you can wait until you’re cooking with it to add the fresh-basil garnish.) This sauce can be your base for cooking any fish fillet, chicken breast, pork fillet, or veal scaloppini. Sear any of these in a pan, add some marinara sauce, season with your favorite herbs, and let it perk for a few minutes—you’ll have yourself a good dish.

Asparagus frittata and pasta . . . If you think you have seen a recipe of mine that sounds like this one, you are right. In an earlier book I gave a recipe for an “Asparagus Frittata with Capellini.” And here’s “Spaghetti with Asparagus Frittata.” But they are not at all the same, even though the ingredients are nearly identical. In the earlier recipe, a bit of leftover cooked pasta is stirred into a frittata as it cooks and bakes into a tender cake, which is then served in wedges. Here you have a quick skillet pasta. In fact, it is a “two-skillet” pasta. In the big skillet you make a very simple sauce with oil, scallions, and pasta water. In another skillet, you scramble up a soft frittata with sautéed asparagus. You also cook a pot of spaghetti. When everything is tossed together—in the big skillet—the textures, tastes, and colors blend beautifully. Follow the recipe instructions for coordinating the cooking the first time you make this. Once you see and sense how everything goes together, you’ll have added a truly wonderful dish to your repertoire of family recipes. This is a good dish to make with fresh homemade egg pastas, such as fettuccine, garganelli, pappardelle, capellini, spaghettini. Instead of asparagus, you could use another vegetable in your frittata, such as zucchini, broccoli, or just onions; or ham, prosciutto, or bacon. Or have a plain frittata.

Here the meaty skillet sauce and the ziti cook at a leisurely pace compared to the rapidity of the preceding capellini with caper sauce. But the cooking principles are the same. In the first few minutes you want to caramelize each ingredient as it is introduced to the pan—this is especially important with the tomato paste, to give it a good toasting before it is liquefied in the pasta water. The sauce needs 6 minutes or more at a good bubbling simmer after adding the water in order to draw out and meld the flavors of the meat and vegetables as well as to soften the pieces of fresh fennel. At that time the ziti will be ready to finish cooking in the sauce.

Passatelli are a traditional soup garnish that resemble fat round noodles (see the photo, above) but they’re made with dried bread crumbs rather than flour. This gives them lots of flavor and a pleasant crumbly texture; in fact, they may remind you of matzoh balls, the Jewish soup dumplings that are also made from dried crumbs and eggs. Passatelli are a snap to make—well ahead if you want—and they cook in less than 5 minutes, right in the soup pot, just before you serve the soup. They are a splendid addition to plain broths, either All-Purpose Turkey Broth (see page 80) or chicken poaching broth (see page 328), and they’d be a nice addition to Savory Potato Broth as well (see page 63). For this small amount of passatelli, I suggest using the simple method of rolling and cutting in the recipe. The shape is not traditional but the taste and texture are exactly as they should be. It doesn’t seem like a lot but the passatelli swell up nicely in the soup. If you want a larger quantity, just multiply the formula here.

This beautiful salad really depends on good ingredients: small firm beets with fresh unblemished greens still attached; a crisp tart apple or perhaps ripe fresh peaches or Black Mission figs; and aged goat cheese with a crumbly consistency. Roasting the beets to intensify the sweetness is also a key to the best salad.

Celery is often underappreciated as a principal salad ingredient. The inner stalks of the head have a wonderful freshness, flavor, and delicacy when thinly sliced. Here I’ve paired them with fresh baby artichoke slices in a salad with lots of bright, subtle flavors and all kinds of crunch. Shards of hard cheese—either Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano—lend even more complexity to the mix. Use only firm and very small artichokes for this: they should feel tight and almost squeak when you squeeze them, and they should have no choke.

Serve this colorful and delicious salad as a first course by itself, with other antipasti, or with grilled foods. You can use this low-fat method of preparing eggplant in other dishes too. I top it with shavings of ricotta salata (ricotta that has been salted and dried in a small round cheese form for about 4 weeks).

As with pizza or focaccia, the bread base of the gratinate can be covered with all manner of savories. A big batch of sliced mushrooms sautéed with lots of garlic and herbs makes a great topping. Use wild mushrooms if you have some or a mixture of wild and cultivated (see box on page 139 for suggestions). Use a whole-grain country bread as a base for a more gutsy flavor.

The inspiration for this recipe came on a recent visit to France. In a small bistro, I was served an elegant but amazingly simple gratin, just a thin layer of sautéed onions with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano on top, baked in a hot oven to form a crisp, fragile delicacy. When I got home, I decided to replicate it—but with a base of thin bread slices underneath the onions, to make it easier to assemble and serve. To my great delight, the bread became wonderfully crisp in the oven, adding more texture, and at the same time captured the delicious onion juices. The key to wonderful flavor here is slowly cooking the onions in a big skillet—they should be meltingly soft without any browning, and moist without excess liquid. Sweet onions are the best—large Vidalia, Maui, Walla Walla, or any other of the fine varieties now available. A gratinate—the Italian term for a baking dish encrusted with cheese or other crisp topping—fills a big sheet pan. It will serve a large group as an appetizer or a lunch dish, or make a great hors d’oeuvre for a crowd, cut in small pieces. You can bake it ahead for convenience, and serve it at room temperature or briefly warmed in the oven.

Pasticcerie, pastry shops, also referred to as Catlisch (a name inherited from the Swiss), are a grand tradition in Palermo. The city was greatly influenced by the French and Swiss in their pastry-making. When I am in Sicily, cannoli and desserts made with citrus are my favorites. In Palermo, I always enjoy desserts and a great cup of espresso at my dear friend’s pastry place, Pepino Stancanpiana’s Catlisch. My Sicilian chef at Felidia, Fortunato Nicotra, makes an elegant version of this, Sicily’s favorite dolce, with deep-fried disks of cannoli pastry stacked high with layers of ricotta cream in between. I like to fry squares of pastry in a skillet—no deep-fryer needed—and build a crispy, creamy cannoli napoleon. In Sicily, cannoli filling is made with sheep’s-milk ricotta, which has a distinctive flavor that can’t be matched by ordinary processed ricotta. Fresh cow’s-milk ricotta, which is widely available now, is what I use. Be sure to drain it well, sweeten lightly, mix with chopped bitter chocolate, candied orange, and toasted almonds for real Sicilian cannoli and add a touch of Grand Marnier for additional flavor.