Ambition, 2.1

One of the reasons I got so het up about the idea of making homemade ricotta was I found a recipe for ricotta gnocchi. Said recipe was part of an article about using homemade ricotta and sure, I could have just bought a tub of cheese at the store and called it a day, but I got ambitious.

Ricotta recipe one failed miserably. Ricotta recipe two turned out splendidly, and now that I had the main ingredient, I could turn it into gnocchi. The actual recipe was for ricotta gnocchi with some kind of mushroom sauce (serves six), but I skipped the mushroom part and figured on substituting my own tomato sauce.

Per the instructions, I weighed out a pound of ricotta and dutifully drained it until it had the texture of wet clay. I mixed in a half cup of flour, an egg, a tablespoon each of olive oil and melted butter, a 1/4 c. of Parmesan
and some salt and pepper. It felt very sticky, so I added another tablespoon of flour. After the fourth (do not add more than four! the recipe said) it was still pretty sticky, not slighty sticky, but, do not add more than four tablespoons!

I did pause a moment to consider that this was the same guy who wrote ricotta recipe one, and maybe, just maybe, he was wrong. Then I decided to follow what was written and play around another time, if necessary.

I covered and chilled the dough. A half hour later, I took the dough out again and tried to divide it into four parts, but it was awfully sticky. I ended up with three. Using copious amounts of flour, I rolled the dough into 3/4-inch-wide logs. Here, the recipe said to cut them into 1-inch pieces, but I thought they would look more, well, gnocchi-like if I pinched off pieces instead. They were still remarkably sticky, so I rolled them in flour before placing them on a baking sheet to chill some more.

At this point, I had to turn the operation over to Will while I took Keith to soccer practice. Shortly before we were due home, he put the gnocchi on to cook. They boiled in water for a few minutes, floated to the top, and he cooked them about two minutes longer and drained them. Keith and I weren't home yet, so Will kept the gnocchi warm by tossing them with some melted butter in a saute pan over low heat. When we finally got home, he served the gnocchi with tomato sauce.

THE VERDICT: Reaction one -- Serves six? I don't think so. We didn't have enough for four servings, with two of them kid-sized. Granted, I didn't do the mushroom sauce business, which might have had something to do with it, but we still should have had enough for four bowls.
Reaction two -- WOW. Wow, wow, wow. These were really good. The gnocchi were extremely light, with a nice texture and flavor. They also went well with the homemade tomato sauce. So next time, I double the recipe.

It's in the can

Whether it's what's on sale or the result of trying to pick hearty fall dishes, lately I seem to have pulled a lot of recipes involving canned tomatoes. I'm kicking myself a bit, because my tomato plants seem to be giving one last hurrah and last week I got several fresh fruits off the vine. But we used them right away -- as we should have, really, and they were good -- and here I am making another sauce thinking, "I wish I had enough real tomatoes to do this from scratch."

Next summer, I keep telling myself, next summer I will have more tomato plants and enough ripe ones at one time to make sauce.

But it is no longer summer, and I used canned tomatoes to make a chicken cacciatore.

I've been meaning to make this for about three weeks, actually, but kept forgetting to take the chicken out to defrost. I hate using the microwave to defrost things. The food never thaws evenly and you have some bits that are cooked while the rest is still rock-solid.

Yesterday, I remembered to take the chicken breasts out and let them thaw in the fridge. So when I took the meat out 24 hours later and found it covered in ice crystals and solid enough to break a tempered glass cutting board, I was more than a little irritable.

While it defrosted, unevenly, in the microwave, I did the rest of the prep work. The recipe said to dice the bell pepper. I chopped more than diced, but I liked the big pieces. I skipped over the part about fennel seed, it being one of those spices I don't use often enough to justify buying at this point in time. And, while Will and I like spicy food, the kids are still on the fence about it, so I used only a (generous) pinch of red pepper flakes instead of the full 1/2 teaspoon in the sauce, and left the jar out for adults to season their food as they wished.

The chicken browned nicely, although it seemed like too much oil was in the pan. I removed the chicken, added the pepper and herbs as directed and stirred them around. Then I poured in the tomatoes, wine and vinegar and the sauce smelled fantastic. I couldn't wait to try it. At this point, I realized the pasta water had finally come to a boil, so I let the sauce simmer while I dumped the spaghetti into the pasta pot.

I returned the chicken returned to the pan to cook through, which took about the same amount of time as the pasta. Again, the food smelled great, and it looked pretty good, too.

THE VERDICT: The sauce was decent enough, but didn't wow me as much as I thought it would based on its fragrance, and the chicken was a little dry. Will liked the sauce, going back for seconds, but thought the chicken was almost surplus. Keith and Alex said it was good, and they ate it. An on-the-fence recipe.

Short-order cooking

Thorough disclaimer: I did not cook this recipe. I got stuck in traffic (read: had to stop and buy coffee beans) and my husband got home well before me, so he kindly consented to make the dinner I had planned.

I had picked a penne with bacon, tomato and cheese sauce, largely because it looked like it could be made in 25 minutes, give or take a few. It did take a fairly short time, making it good for busy weeknights. We used turkey bacon, which didn't quite yield the 4 Tbsp. pan drippings the recipe called for, so we threw in a little olive oil.

We ran into a little snag when we tried to open the red wine: Our corkscrew mysteriously disappeared. I was just starting to gauge whether our kitchen scissors would fit in the cork when my husband remembered the never-used wine picnic tote I got a decade ago at a holiday party at work. Like my recipe collection, it's one of those things I just can't part with because someday, we might actually get a babysitter and go do the loaf of bread, jug of wine thing. Anyway, the tote also comes with a handy portable corkscrew, and I knew exactly where to find it.

THE VERDICT: It was a pretty fast cooking recipe, as I suspected. The sauce was tasty enough -- we used Parmesan for the cheese, incidentally -- although a little on the thin side. But as my husband pointed out, he cooked more penne than the recipe called for, so that may have had something to do with it. The bacon added a little variety to an otherwise straightforward sauce. Worth making again, perhaps with a smokier cheese.

Making it up as I go along

One of the many differences between my husband and myself is he is a much more flexible cook than I am. He can come home from work and throw something together; when I try to do that, the answer more likely than not is pasta, probably with a quick-and-dirty alfredo sauce. He can make up dinners without a recipe; I have to know in advance exactly what I'm making and that I have the ingredients handy.

Sometimes, though, I venture into the realm of cooking without a precise recipe. For me, these are baby steps, starting with something I have a general idea about and may even have made before, and then tweaking it here and there. Something like lasagna.

Making lasagna is kind of the reverse of my binder-clearing project; instead of trying out different published recipes, I'm trying to create something worth writing down. Sure, I can make a decent lasagna using the recipe on the back of the pasta box, but the top layer is always too tough and jarred sauces never do it for me. So I want to make up my own.

My basic sauce recipe originally came from a friend, who also made it up as she went along. I started by sauteing a couple of pressed garlic cloves in a little olive oil. If I were making a strict pasta sauce, I would use three or four cloves. In a lasagna, however, I don't want the garlic to be overwhelming.

I put in some tomato paste and a large can of tomato sauce. I don't know why working from canned tomato sauce tastes better to me than using a jar of the stuff, but it does. I dream of getting enough tomatoes out of my meager garden to make sauce entirely from scratch, a dream deferred until next summer.

I like the flavor onions give to sauces, but I don't like the taste or texture of onions themselves and picking them out of my lasagna is not an option. To get around it, I dropped a tablespoon of granulated onion bits into the sauce. Next I added whatever herbs were handy, in this case, fresh oregano, rosemary and basil, a pinch of dried marjoram and two bay leaves. Normally at this point I also slosh in some red wine, but I didn't have it handy so I went without. Last, I tossed in a chunk of Parmesan cheese, and simmered on low for a while.

Meanwhile, I browned some sausages, another tip I got from a friend, and set them aside. I started the pasta. After confirming the milk in the fridge was still good, I went to work on a bechamel sauce. Finally, I threw some ricotta, grated mozzarella, Parmesan and a couple of eggs into a bowl and mixed it all together.

I started layering with some bechamel, a little tomato sauce, noodles, cheese, sausage, tomato sauce, noodles... two things quickly became obvious. One, I needed a lot more sausage than I had. Two, it probably wouldn't have hurt to mix it in with some of the tomato sauce. I skipped the sausage on the middle layer to save it for the top. After laying down the last of the noodles, I topped it with the rest of the bechamel and copious amounts of finely shredded mozzarella. And baked it.

VERDICT: The result was one fine-looking lasagne. It was pretty good, although a lot cheesier and less meaty than I would like; next time I scale back on the ricotta and double the sausage. The top layer of noodles wasn't too tough or overcooked. My husband was skeptical of the use of bechamel at first, but liked it after he tried it. The boys ate seconds. We're getting closer.