Penne with Creamy Tomato-Chipotle Cheese Sauce on a Lazy Sunday

It is Sunday.

It is cloudy outside.

I am going to Nashville tomorrow. For 23 hours. Total. That is the whole trip.

How did I decide to spend this day?

There were many things I should have done. I should have cleaned the bathroom, paid bills, raked leaves, and done a million other things tormenting me from my to do lists (note the use of the plural). I did do some of these things.

Then, I needed a break. You ask, "how did you decide to take this break?" I made pasta and watched a made for TV movie (starring James Van Der Beek, no joke) with Max on the couch. Don't judge me about the movie.

This pasta recipe is perfect for happy comfort times. It is fast and simple. This is one of the pasta sauce recipes that taught me that pasta and sauce belong together. It is smokey, hardy, and creamy. So satisfying.

I used to think pasta sauce came out of a jar. You open a jar, heat up the sauce, boil the pasta, then you serve pasta and sauce at the table. It turns out that pasta tastes better when it is finished in the sauce, then it absorbs some of the sauce and flavor. Sauce does not need to come in jars all finished. It comes from ingredients, ingredients that do not necessarily need all day to cook. Not necessarily complex.

This is it. Pasta + ingredients = pasta in sauce.

Penne with Creamy Tomato-Chipotle Sauce

modified a little from A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen by Jack Bishop

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

4 medium garlic cloves, minced

2 small chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, minced (these exist in almost every grocery store)

1 tablespoon of the adobo sauce (from the jar)

2 14.5 ounce cans of diced tomatoes

salt

1 pound penne, rigatoni, or any tubular pasta

2 tablespoons minced fresh cilantro leaves

5 ounces feta cheese or a fresh goat cheese

1. Bring 4 quarts of water to boil in a large pot. I have always heard that the water should be as salty as Mediterranean... I am not sure I ever remember specifically tasting the Mediterranean, but I think the water should be salty because it seasons the pasta and then you need less salt later.

Garlic and chipotle chiles are really all it takes to flavor this pasta.

2. Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When the oil is warm, add the garlic and cook for 1 to 2 minutes. The garlic should be golden and delicious smelling. Then add the chipotles and adobo sauce. Cook this until fragrant (about 1 minute)

3. Add the tomatoes and a three fingered pinch of salt to the chiles and garlic. Now we have a sauce! Bring this to a simmer and allow it to cook for 15 minutes.

These are home canned tomatoes. Derek and I spent hours making these this summer. When I opened up the can, it smelled like summer again. Was it worth the time? Questionable.

4. When there is about 10 minutes left for the sauce, add the pasta to the boiling water. Cook it for about 2 to 3 minutes less than the package says. You want it to be too undercooked to eat when you drain it. Trust me. Before you drain the pasta reserve about 1 cup of the pasta water. Drain the pasta.

5. Crumble the cheese into the sauce and combine. Add the pasta to the sauce and stir it up. At this point, I usually add about 1/2 cup to 1 cup of pasta water to the pasta and sauce. This helps get the sauce evenly distributed and the starches in the pasta water help thicken up the sauce. Stir the pasta constantly into the sauce until the pasta absorbs the sauce and the pasta is cooked to your taste. Stir in the minced cilantro.

Pasta water is miraculous.

6. Eat! Preferably with Van Der Beek and a kitten.

P.S. - His forehead is really huge. What a man.

Sweet Potato Dumplings

My life is really pretty simple most of the time. I get up in the morning, go to work, work, come home from work, cook dinner, watch Netflix, read the Kindle, and go to bed. With no Derek on the continent, my life has gotten even simpler. No one cooks complicated meals for themselves, me included. If they say they do, they are lying.

Then sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I go away for work. As I have mentioned before, October was really complicated. I was on the road.

When I get home, I just want vegetables and home cooked food. My friends want to see me and they want to go out (very flattering). Sometimes, I make them come over and cook them my vegetables, the more the merrier. Right?

My recipes have been gathering dust at home. This might be because every time I get home I have about 4 things going bad in the refrigerator. You could say mold and decay are inspiring me to figure out recipes to use decaying food. This is my real life.

Last week I made my friend come over, and I made dumplings. Inspired by the sweet potatoes under my counter. I am proud of this recipe. These were real good. They are vegan too. That was not on purpose, they just did not need animal protein. True.

Sweet Potato Dumplings

Makes about 20 dumplings

3 small sweet potatoes (about 1 pound), peeled and diced into 1 inch cubes

1 jalepeno, minced

2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

1 teaspoon red chile powder

squirt of sriaracha sauce (to taste)

dash of soy sauce (to taste)

dash of fish sauce (just do it, leave out if you really want to be vegan)

1/4 teaspoon of salt (I used a little less)

Wanton wrappers (your grocery store probably sells these)

Sauce:

1/4 cup soy sauce

1 heavy squirt of sriarcha (to taste)

2 tablespoons (approximately) sesame oil

1. Boil a large pot of salted water. Add the sweet potatoes to the boiling water. Boil until they are soft (about 10 minutes). Drain the water.

2. In a large bowl, combine the cooked sweet potatoes, garlic, jalepeno, red chile powder, sriaracha sauce, soy sauce, fish sauce, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Mash the potatoes using a fork, potato masher, or pastry blender (if you are me).

3. Open the wanton wrappers, cover the open package with a damp paper towel so they do not dry out. Fill up a small bowl with water. Remove one wrapper, put a large dollop of the potato mixture on the wanton.

4. Wet a finger and coat the edges of the wanton wrapper. Bring all four of the corners of the wrapper together and pinch it closed.

5. This is where you have to make a decision. Do you want your dumplings steamed or pan fried? If you want the dumplings steamed it is now time to heat up your steaming apparatus. If you want to fry them heat up your frying pan to medium with about a tablespoon of canola oil in it.

6. When you have finished making all of your desired dumplings (this should make about 20 dumplings), add the dumplings to the frying pan for about 1 minute. Then decrease the heat to medium low, add about 1/4 cup of water to the pan and cover it. Cook with the lid on for about 5 minutes. Remove the lid and finishing browning the dumplings. I like to rotate them to get all of the sides crispy. You can also just eat them with one side browned.

7. If you are steaming the dumplings, put them in the steamer for 5 to 10 minutes.

To make sauce: Combine soy sauce, sriaracha sauce, and sesame oil.

Fennel Pizza and My Favorite Pizza Dough

This is a great recipe. But it is not what most people think of as pizza. This pizza would probably disappoint your typical kid. This pizza has not met a tomato. There is a little bit of cheese, but no mozzarella.

It is delicious. When Derek was preparing to leave for Germany I asked him what he would like to have for his last American dinner. His instant response was, "fennel pizza." Now this is not an American recipe, I am not even sure it is an Italian recipe. But, I love the boy so I just smiled and we made pizza.

The dough is pretty delicious and we use it for everything. Sometimes we just have to many leftovers in the fridge and we make a pizza to put them on (this is not a joke). We are really good at pizza. Not to be too egotistical, but sometimes when we are eating pizza at a restaurant, I realize that our pizza is better.

My Pizza Guidelines:

1.)Hot oven. Pretty much as hot as your oven can go. Then let the oven preheat for about 10 minutes after it says it is ready.

2.)Think light. Our home ovens can not handle too thick of a pizza. If the crust or the toppings are too thick they will not cook all of the way and you will have soggy pizza.

3.)Pizza stone, optional. The pizza stone really helps you get that crusty crust and it helps the oven maintain that temperature. But you do not need it. This recipe requires no special kitchen gadgets.

These recipes were published by Jim Lahey in his book My Bread. We love this book, every recipe we have made from it is great, his basic bread is the best. I have written about it here. You would think that this book would just be about bread, but it has a whole chapter on pizza. None of his pizzas are traditionally what we think of as pizza, none have sauce, most don't have cheese, and they usually have only 3 or 4 ingredients.

Basic Pizza Dough

not modified at all from Jim Lahey's My Bread

makes two 9 x 13 pizzas or four personal pizzas

3 1/4 cups (500 grams) Bread Flour

2 1/2 teaspoons (10 grams) Active Dry Yeast

3/4 teaspoon (5 grams) Table Salt

3/4 teaspoon (about 3 grams) plus pinch Sugar

1 1/3 cups (300 grams) Room Temperature (about 72 degrees F) Water

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1. In a a medium bowl, stir together the flour, yeast, salt, and sugar. Add the water and stir using a wooden spoon or your hand for at least 30 seconds or until blended. The dough should be wet and sticky. Cover the bowl and let it sit at room temperature until it has more than doubled in volume (about 2 hours).

2. Scrap the dough out of the bowl using a rubber spatula onto a well-floured work surface. Gently form into a rough ball (it will be sticky). Cut this ball into two (if you are making two large pizzas) or four (for four small pizzas). Space them 4 inches apart and cover with a moistened kitchen towel and allow to them to rest for 30 minutes.

3. Now you can form the balls into pizzas or freeze them. To freeze, coat the inside of a plastic bag with olive oil and put ball inside. They should keep about a month in the freezer. If you want to wait to use the dough, they will keep for about a day in the refrigerator in a plastic bag. Before use, defrost frozen dough in the refrigerator and let it sit on counter for 30 minutes to warm to room temperature.

4. To form the pizzas, oil a 9 x 13 inch rimmed baking dish (no pizza stone, although I do use a baking stone for a lot of my other pizzas). Use a fair bit of oil on the pan and spread it out evenly. Invert the dough onto the pan (preferably with moist side of the dough down on the pan). Using your hands, gently pull, press, and stretch dough across the pan. It should take up all of the pan evenly. Sometimes I used my oiled rolling pin to spread it really evenly. Try not to let the dough rip, if you do, press the holes together.

5. Now top the pizza with fennel topping (or whatever you want).

Fennel Pizza (Pizza Finocchio)

from the same book as above

Makes enough topping for one 9x13 inch pizza

2 medium (650 grams) Trimmed Fennel Bulbs

1/2 cup loosely packed (40 grams) Freshly Grated Parmigiano Reggiano or Grana Padano Cheese (see note b)

3/4 teaspoon (4 grams) Table Salt

1/4 teaspoon (1 gram) Freshly Ground Black Pepper

about 1/4 cup (about 60 grams) Extra Virgin Olive Oil

The pizza dough from above

1. Preheat oven to 500 degrees F (hot!), with the rack in the center.

2. Use a knife or mandoline to cut the fennel into really thin slices (1/16 of an inch), don't cut your fingers. You want about 7 cups of sliced fennel.

3. Put all of the fennel in a bowl and toss them with cheese, salt, pepper, and olive oil.

4. Spread the fennel mixture over the dough, going all of the way to the edges. No crust on this pizza. In fact, you want the topping to be slightly more thick at the edges, because the outside tends to brown more quickly.

5. Bake for 30 minutes, plus or minus 5 minutes. I find that mine is done at 25 minutes, but my oven is hot.

Note a: I have used this dough for lots of pizza types. When I am making sauce containing pizzas I tend to use the pizza peel and stone. I just like them that way.

Note b: I think this pizza might work without cheese, if you are avoiding it. If you are avoiding cow dairy, I think a hard goat or sheep cheese would work.

Perfecting the BLT

Remember Platonic forms from college?

Plato talked about how the things we see in the world are really only mimicking the true Form (yeah, apparently we do capitalize that word in this context). These Forms are the blueprint of perfection. Perfection exists in theory and we recreate it imperfectly in the physical world.

I know, I sound like a crazy person. I am probably totally misusing Platonic philosophy... I think about true forms of food a lot. For example, in Platonic philosophy there is a true Form of the tomato. When I eat a really good looking, delicious tomato in August I think to myself, "This is pretty close to that Platonic ideal."

Really, I do think this. I know the honors program in undergraduate was a bad thing for me...

I think Max the cat is very close to the perfect feline Form.

I think a lot of food people think like this though, striving for the perfect dish or ingredient. I know that perfection is relative, but whatever! Allow me my musings.

Derek and I have a group of friends who have been pursuing some ideal food Forms together. By this I mean we have met a couple of times trying to perfect classic dishes. By classic, I mean those things you can get in any American diner.

Earlier this summer we collectively made hamburgers. We ground our own meat, made our own ketchup, buns, etc. They would have made Plato smile from whatever cave he sits in (hahaha, philosophy humor).

Those are some good looking hamburger buns, what they have bacon in them? Those are some GREAT looking buns...

This week we tackled the BLT. The acronym indicates bacon, lettuce, and tomato are the primary ingredient of this sandwich. We actually varied from this a little bit, so I am not sure it is a true close to perfect BLT, but we did make a close to perfect sandwich.

I cannot really post a single recipe up for our BLT spectacular. Each ingredient has its own little story. I think I will just put up pictures of the festivities. Sorry if the pictures are a little yellow. It was kind of dark in there.

The Crew

David

Aaron

Derek (also known as my true love)

Jono

and me of course.

The Beer and the Lettuce

This is red leaf lettuce and that beer is from Fullsteam, a one year old Durham brewery that Derek and I are obsessed with. To be fair Jono provided lots of other beer and Aaron brought wine.

The Bread

Actually, Derek and I made Pizza Bianca. Sliced in half this is a delicious sandwich bread.

Maybe we also lightly pan fried the inside in bacon fat.

The Bacon

David made this! I feel like such a bacon proselytizer.

Fried on low heat until just starting to crisp, not too crispy though.

The Tomatoes

I actually have no idea what kind of tthese are. They came in our CSA, so the red kind...

Condiments and Sides

Aaron and David made Aioli

Aaron's ratatouille

David's Green Bean Salad

Yes, those are roasted Hatch Green Chiles in the foreground.

Perfection

Do not judge me for my glass of wine and glass of beer. That is totally normal. Do you ever notice how many of my food photos have some sort of alcoholic beverage slightly in the frame? Oh dear...

Thanks guys!