Eggplant and tomato spaghetti. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
At the height of summer, when the markets are filled with Technicolor produce, pick out a beautiful, plump eggplant and a few heirloom tomatos and make this sumptuous variation on ratatouille. Minus the squash, it's still rich with roasted vegetal and herbal deliciousness. This recipe is adapted from Francis Lam's Let-My-Eggplant-Go-Free! Sauce
Eggplant and Tomato Spaghetti
Serves 3 generous portions
1 pound eggplant, peeled and cut into ½ inch dice
1 tablespoon salt
3 ripe tomatoes
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
3 cloves garlic, smashed
2 sprigs thyme or oregano, chopped
1 cup water
6 leaves basil, chiffonade
Salt and pepper to taste
1 pound spaghetti, cooked
1. Place the eggplant cubes in a sieve over a bowl and toss with salt. Let sit for a half hour to draw the bitter juices out of the eggplant. Meanwhile, peel and cut the tomatoes into chunks.
2. In a heavy saucepan such as a Dutch oven, pour in the olive oil and set over low heat. Add the garlic cloves.
3. Wipe any moisture off of the eggplant. When the garlic sizzles, add the eggplant and stir to coat it with oil. Turn up the heat, add the tomato and herbs and stir. When the eggplant and tomato soften, add the liquid, let it come to a boil, then lower the heat to medium-low. Cover the pot, leaving an edge exposed for steam to escape.
4. After about 20 minutes, the vegetables should be soft and melting and ready for the pasta. Taste and adjust the seasonings. Serve immediately, garnished with additional basil.
Butternut squash soup. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
When the days turn brisk and the nights come early, my food radar hones in on soup. Rich, luscious soups filled with winter vegetables, designed to warm from the inside out. So, when FIGO Pasta asked if I'd like to visit one of its Atlanta locations and try out the November sagra, its celebration menu featuring butternut squash soup, of course I said yes.
FIGO Pasta. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
FIGO in Vinings is a cozy neighborhood joint, noisy with families and groups hungry for homemade, filling Italian fare from housemade pastas to risottos. We tried the butternut squash soup and it was just the way I like it - a smooth puree, sweet with vegetable, tempered with chicken stock and cream. A bowl of this soup, with a few slices of FIGO's bread makes a satisfying supper after a busy day punching the clock or holiday shopping or kid-wrangling.
Bread and olive oil. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
We followed the soup with Gemelli Con Zucca, pasta with butternut squash. The gemmeli was warm and toothsome and the butternut squash chunks were sweet and pleasant. The sage crumbled on top as a garnish was initially overpowering - musty in that dried sage way, but once stirred into the dish was less noticeable. The real gold in the dish were the tender cloves of whole roasted garlic, covered in the light cream sauce.
Gemelli with butternut squash and sage. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
The butternut sagra is available at all metro Atlanta FIGO locations. Check out www.figopasta.com for more information.
Thanks again for a lovely meal, FIGO Pasta.
Text and images copyright 2012, Lucy Mercer.
Disclaimer: The meal at FIGO Pasta was complimentary. I have not been compensated for this post. All opinions are my own.
How incredible is it that the Italian language has its own
word for food festival? The word is sagra, and Figo Pasta is celebrating its
Sagra delle Fragole in honor of strawberries through the end of summer with a
three-course menu highlighting the sweet and tart fruit.
House-made bread with olive oil, while waiting. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
The menu begins with Bruschetta alla Fragole, slices of
toasted ciabatta with a shmear of goat cheese, topped with a salad of sliced
cherry tomatoes and strawberries with balsamic vinegar and basil ($5). The
generous portion could easily be shared, but I confess that I gobbled down all
three pieces without apology.
Strawberry bruschetta. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
Next up: Osso Bucco Ravioli ~ a filling of braised veal
shank meat stuffed into Figo’s house-made ravioli. Served with a Parmesan cream
sauce and drizzled with a snappy strawberry black pepper glaze ($12). My
ravioli-crazy daughter loved this dish, especially the tart and savory
combination of sauce and glaze.
Ravioli at Figo Pasta. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
And for dolci, the sweet stuff, pasta dough infused with
strawberries and filled with a rich mixture of Nutella, ricotta and mascarpone,
then deep-fried to crispy goodness. Eager dessert lovers beware – fresh out of
the fryer, you get a mouth full of Nutella lava and possibly a dribble on the
chin or table. Small bites from the corners are the way to go here. And yes,
the ravioli are delicious. By all means, share this dish ($5).
Strawberry fried ravioli with Nutella filling. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
Figo has seven locations throughout Atlanta; I visited the
Vinings location. Figo Pasta in Vinings is the best kind of neighborhood
restaurant – patrons walk their dogs to the front door of the east Paces Ferry
location, tie their animal to the porch rail, pop inside to order, and return
to the porch to wait for an employee to bring the food outside.It’s also toddler and infant friendly as
evidenced by the many young families stopping by for pasta on a recent Sunday
evening.
The sagra tradition doesn’t end when the strawberry season
does (if strawberry season ever truly ends) – Grape Sagra is slated for September.
I have to hide the pine nuts when they come into my house. It seems like everyone wants to nibble on these little guys - they're rich and flavorful and as the saying goes, you can't eat just one (handful).
Pine nuts. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
The good folks at Frieda's Specialty Produce sent me a goody package last month that included pine nuts. I nibbled on them for a bit, and then hid them in a succession of places - the pantry, the cabinet, the freezer, and doling them out in dishes like my New Year's greens with pine nuts and raisins.
Pine nuts from Frieda's. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
And then my neighbor gave me some arugula from her CSA box and I knew it was time for Arugula Pesto Pasta, the wintertime version of summer's best dish, Basil Pesto Pasta. Arugula is an acquired taste, I think. It can be peppery and strong, but I love it. I'm just saying that this dish is probably not going to win any fans under the age of 12. As we say in our house, that's just more for me.
Arugula. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
Arugula pesto with pine nuts. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
Arugula Pesto
4 cups packed arugula leaves, cleaned and stemmed
1/4 cups toasted pine nuts
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1/4 olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
1 pound pasta such as spaghetti or rotini or farfalle, cooked according to package directions
More pine nuts for garnish
1. In a food processor, blitz the arugula leaves. Add cheese and pine nuts and process again for 15 seconds. With food processor running, add olive oil in a stream through the feeding tube. Taste for seasoning and add salt and pepper. Serve pesto over cooked pasta and garnish with additional pine nuts. Serve immediately. Store leftover pesto in an airtight container in the refrigerator, although it is best eaten when freshly prepared.
(recipe adapted from Epicurious.com)
Rotini with arugula pesto. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
Homemade pasta is one of those "many hands make for light work" kitchen projects. Sure, it can be made alone, and it's a pleasant task, and with the sunlight streaming through the window and NPR on the radio, a pasta project can make for a soothing and satisfying afternoon. In my house, though, I pull out the Atlas pasta machine and the girls come running, and crafting linguine becomes "mini hands make for light work."
Part of my motivation for writing about food is to leave a record for my children, so they will have recipes and recorded memories of our family life. I want my daughters to be competent in the kitchen, to know good food and feel comfortable preparing it - that's why I make homemade pasta and let my girls join in.
I wish I could say that I learned to make pasta from a nonna, one of the Italian grandmothers that Carol Field writes about in "In Nonna's Kitchen." My Alabama grandmother was a society lady who wore Italian leather pumps and could make a mean tomato aspic from Campbell's soup. For my own kitchen education, I turn to books, like those of Carol Field and Marcella Hazan. When I first started making pasta, I used the detailed instructions in Marcella’s “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.” I recommend it as the premier primer on homemade egg pasta.
Here is how I make pasta and a tasty clam sauce to accompany. To quell the anti-authentic hue and cry in the comment section, I will state first off that this is how a Scotch-Irish-German girl from Georgia makes pasta. I use a food processor to mix and knead it and I use salt and olive oil in the pasta dough. Marcella doesn’t do this - but my pasta turns out fine, so that’s all I can say. I’ve watched many times while TV chefs make a crater out of flour, crack eggs into it and mix all together with a fork. My experience with this method is a gunky countertop. The processor is super-fast and the clean-up is easy.
Homemade egg pasta for linguine
This is a double recipe of pasta, yielding about 1 ½ pounds. It’s too much for the accompanying clam sauce, unless you’re a serious carbo-phile. Toss noodles lightly in flour and arrange in nests on baking sheet. Let dry for an hour or so, place in plastic container and freeze. When it’s time to cook, frozen pasta can go directly into the boiling pot of pasta water.
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 large eggs, organic if possible
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1. In the bowl of a food processor, place flour and salt and pulse a few times to combine. Add eggs and olive oil and pulse until dough forms into a solid ball. Let knead by running processor for two minutes. The dough should be firm and smooth like a baby's bum.
2. Turn dough ball into an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rest for a half hour. You can also place dough in an oiled plastic bag, squish out the air, seal it and refrigerate for up to a day.
Pasta dough by Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
3. When you’re ready to roll, make sure to have plenty of counter space and kitchen helpers. Divide dough into 12 equal-ish pieces and flatten each into a round. Dust your work area with flour and set a willing worker to roll the dough. Have a drying rack ready, or half-sheet pans dusted with flour, ready to receive noodles. Also handy to have around - a damp tea cloth or paper towel to spread over the pasta lumps as each waits its turn at the press.
4. With the pasta roller adjusted to the widest setting, feed the first flattened piece of dough through the pasta roller. Fold the remainder letter style, that is, top third and bottom third over middle. Feed this piece through. Repeat once more, for a total of three passes through the widest setting of the machine. Repeat with remaining 11 dough pieces.
5. Thinning: reduce the setting one notch and feed each piece through, setting each thinned piece on a floured countertop or across the drying rack. When each piece has been thinned, reduce the setting size to the next smallest number and run each piece through again. Repeat: reducing the setting and running a piece through until you reach the thinnest setting. After the final pass, the pasta sheets will be as long as a child’s winter scarf and as thin as a sheet of paper.
Baby girl making pasta. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
6. Attach the cutter to the pasta machine. Feed each sheet through the cutter, watching your child’s face as she sees the noodles take shape. If you do not have a pasta drying rack, you may set nests of the noodles on a lightly floured baking sheet.
Baby girl rolling out pasta. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
7. Let noodles dry while the water in the pasta pot comes to a boil. If you’ve never worked with fresh pasta, you will be amazed at how quickly it cooks - just a minute or two to toothsome noodles. Uncooked noodles may be stored in an airtight container in the freezer. They will cook easily in boiling water, no need to defrost.
Homemade linguine with clam sauce. Lucy Mercer/A Cook and Her Books
Clam Sauce
In my house this dish is simply called “clams.” If I use dried pasta, it’s a pantry meal that can be put together in about 30 minutes, while the water is boiling for the pasta. With homemade fresh pasta, it’s worthy of company.
½ medium onion, minced
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 (6 ½ oz.) cans chopped clams, drain and reserve liquid
½ cup dry white wine, or vermouth
A handful of fresh herbs such as oregano, basil and thyme, minced (in winter, start with ½ teaspoon Italian seasoning or a mixture of appropriate dried herbs in your cabinet, to taste)
Freshly ground black pepper
1 pound linguine, dried or fresh, cooked
1. In a skillet over medium heat, saute onion in olive oil until softened. Add garlic and stir for about 30 seconds.
2. Add wine and let cook until reduced by half. Add reserved clam liquid and allow to cook down.
3. Add clams, herbs and freshly ground pepper to taste. It’s tempting to add salt, but be very careful - it’s easy to over-salt this dish.
There's an old Guy Clark song about home-grown tomatoes that is stuck in my head.
"Homegrown tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes,
What'd life be without homegrown tomatoes?
Only two things that money can't buy -
That's true love & homegrown tomatoes."
Back when the world was young, I was a gardener and like many gardeners, I prayed for summer rains, juicy homegrown tomatoes and raised garden beds. A few years of vegetable gardening on my hands and knees, combined with successive drought years, cured me of these grand illusions and I got a CSA subscription instead. For those who don’t about a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) subscription, it’s kind of like the best of the farmer’s market packed up just for you each week - including homely home-grown tomatoes - without all the work.
My biggest and best garden was the summer that I was expecting my first daughter and the nesting urge manifested in the garden - I planted 30 pepper plants, 60 tomato plants, countless cucumbers and zucchini, corn, green beans, pumpkins, watermelon. There was just one little problem - my due date was July 21, right at the height of harvest. When friends and family came to our house to visit the baby, we instructed them to go into the garden and take everything they wanted - ripe tomatoes - Big Boy, Better Boy, Green Zebra, cherry tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes; cukes and zukes as big as Louisville Sluggers; bell peppers; jalapanos; scotch bonnets. Everything went somewhere else - as new parents, we were too discombobulated adjusting to a baby to deal with a vegetable garden, too.
In the intervening years, I've played around with a garden, but not too seriously. Until last year, Georgia was in a severe drought and growing vegetables with water restrictions wasn't really viable. This summer, I’m a gardener again. In a spot by the house that gets full sun and blistering heat, my husband built raised beds in a structure that he calls the Ultimate Garden Tub - three sections, each containing a tub filled with soil, and irrigation to boot. My husband is the kind of guy you can give a box of toothpicks to and he’ll create a scale replica of the Taj Mahal. In the spirit of the second part of the mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle” he took three Harvest Gold hexagonal concrete bathtubs and built a surround for them, adding irrigation and posts for a trellis (that's phase II).
The raised beds limit my seedling-shopping splurges, which is a good thing. Here are the tomato and pepper plants - we’re looking at another few weeks ‘til harvest.
One of the glories of summer tomatoes, homegrown or farmer's market, is using the fruit in a light tomato pasta. Chopped beefsteak tomatoes, creamy Fontina cheese and basil from the herb bed are tossed with warm pasta. One pot and one bowl, light cooking and housekeeping.
Spaghetti with Summer Sauce
I adapted this recipe from a clipping from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in the summer of 1995, three years before the summer of Laura. I know the year because of the Alka-Seltzer coupon on the back that expired 7-16-95. I used three beefsteak tomatoes in this recipe - they totaled 2 1/4 pounds.
3 large, ripe tomatoes, cut into rough chunks
8 ounces fontina, cubed
½ cup rough-chopped basil, plus more for garnish
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 pound spaghetti
1 to 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar, or to taste
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1. In a large shallow bowl, combine the tomatoes, fontina, basil, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. Put this together an hour before you plan to eat and set aside at room temperature.
2. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and cook the pasta 8 to 10 minutes, until al dente. Drain the pasta and toss with the sauce. Season with salt, pepper, red wine vinegar and additional basil. Serve at once, sprinkled with grated Parmesan cheese.
I used about half of this week's arugula in a pasta with peas. It was perfect for a summer night's supper, with a baguette to go with, and a vinaigrette-dressed salad beforehand. Watermelon and cantaloupe chunks completed the best of summer menu.
Here's how I made it:
Farfalle with Peas and Arugula
1 pound dried farfalle (bowties) pasta 1 pound arugula, washed and torn into bite size pieces 3 tablespoons unsalted butter 3 tablespoons olive oil 3 cloves minced garlic 1 cup frozen English peas Juice of half a lemon 1/4 cup freshly shaved parmesan cheese
1. Put a pot of water on the stove and set to boil. Cook pasta according to package directions.
2. Meanwhile, melt the butter and olive oil and saute the minced garlic just until slightly softened. Add peas and season with salt and pepper. Judicious use of fresh herbs at this time may be helpful, perhaps thyme, definitely parsley. Add the arugula in small portions, cooking each until wilted.
3. When the pasta is ready, use a measuring cup to scoop out one cup of the pasta water. Use this to freshen the sauce, if necessary. Drain the pasta and pour into a lovely, large bowl, the show-offy artisanal one that you use for your prettiest pastas. Toss the garlicky greens and peas with the pasta, squeeze a bit of the lemon over all, and serve with fresh parmesan shavings (if you have the good stuff, by all means, use it on this.).
