Matt Makes Dinner: Fettucine Alfredo with Shrimp

Because I'm the one writing it, this blog can have a pretty narrow focus at times. It can appear that I am the only one in our kitchen, messing around, taking far more time than I should and barricading the rest of the world. This impression, however, is wrong in more than one way. First, I haven't lived alone for over nine years, and then only briefly. I've always cooked for and with a family of some composition. Many of my roommates, friends, and ex-wives are wonderful and opinionated cooks, and even those who don't cook made strong impressions on my kitchen adventures by means of their palates and grocery shopping habits. Integrating foodways can be one of the most interesting and most challenging parts of living with someone. Also, I love to cook with people, and for people, and so my cooking, while informed by my personal interests and tastes, is inextricably bound up with my friends and family.

Which brings me to Matt making dinner. This is not an unusual event. Although I don't feature his work here enough, Matt loves to cook and to eat good things, and has strong opinions and talents in the kitchen. He excels at the grill, and prefers pure ingredients cooked simply and well over complicated, fussy creations. His scrambled eggs, as I've mentioned, are perfect. He likes to experiment (and has several unusual cooking show pilots in the works--more on this later), but understands the worth of a well-executed standard. Because he knows so firmly what he likes, he is an instructive audience to cook for, and his commentary is very welcome, especially because he's willing to try anything.

I love learning to cook with people whose basic methods are different than mine, learning their techniques and favored ingredients, their strengths and weaknesses. For instance, there's Libby and me on salad: I underdress, and often forget to make one, she loves them, and piles on not only plenty of dressing but an overload of good things (chickpeas, corn, and craisins topping the list). Having someone in the house who cooks along very different lines helps to vary the whole way we live.

The other night, after I'd draped the oven and a chair or twoin parsley flecked fettucine, Matt got to work on a cream sauce, via Mark Bittman, spiked with saffron and egg. The end result was simple, beautiful, and delicious, as is most of Matt's cooking.And who knew, a year ago, that I would adore shrimps so much after a 26-year hiatus? More on Matt's cooking and our cooking and eating together to come. I want this blog to chronicle not just my cooking, but a whole way of life and living with food, which is why I detail our CSA, our friends, our grocery shopping, and the pressures of the world outside.

Mangiamacaroni

Every once in a while, Freecycle stops being an inbox-clogger and connects the right people. A chance hopeful post the other day put me in touch with two great people named Alice and Simon, who handed down to me a good-as-new Atlas pasta machine. It's great to get free stuff, sure, but even more than that it is great to participate in a community of exchange where old things don't have to be thrown out, and every new adventure or pursuit doesn't have to start with money. We almost all have more than enough of something (I, for example, have silverware and compost to excess at this time), and it feels good to be able to share and to receive.

In telling me about the machine, Alice shared how special it had been when she first got it in the seventies, and knowing what it meant to her makes it all the more special in my kitchen. And have I been using it?

Oh yes. I have already made two batches and hope to make more soon. I've had some mishaps with sticky dough, and with dirty countertops (gritty pasta=very very bad), but on the whole, it couldn't be easier to work with and turns out lovely, uniform pasta. I'm using Alice Waters' recipe (2c flour, 2 eggs, 2 yolks), and also had good luck subbing in greens for half the eggs. Pasta is so versatile, so delicious, and so fun to play with. Lasagne, anyone?

Thank you, Alice and Simon, for sharing this lovely, sturdy old machine with me. I hope to keep it in the family for a long time.

Mark Bittman's Kasha Varnishkes

Or, I do whatever the NYtimes tells me to, part two. There have actually been several unsuccessful efforts between this post and the Chocolate Chip Cookies, but the Times has a surprisingly high hook rate, I tend to make at least one recipe of theirs a week, if not more. This week's breakaway winner was Mark Bittman's simple Kasha Varnishkes. I even had chicken fat leftover from last week's roast. I made it last night--this version is fast enough even for the likes of Rachel Ray, and I was making another recipe at the same time. I particularly liked learning Bittman's way of drying out the onions--he cooks them covered in a dry pan to sweat out some juice, and only adds fat after ten minutes when they've shrunk and started to brown. And it's so so delicious.

I inhaled half of it five seconds after it was done, added a bunch of sauteed mushrooms and repeated the process for breakfast today. It's that good. Sometimes color and fresh vegetables are just not everything. Sometimes you have to inhale greyish-brown, oniony food, cooked in chicken fat, and praise your ancestors for coming up with anything so good. (If anyone's counting, the mushrooms, and the kasha were farmer's market local, but I'm not kidding myself that that detail truly affected the dish.) Thanks, ancestors. You really did this one proud..

Nyuckis

Back the days of my picky youth, when I was a vociferous and unforgiving critic of everything my mother ever cooked, there was one meal in the dinner rotation that pretty much took the gross-out cake. Every now and again, perfectly good pasta would disappear, and a special dish would take its place. The name of this dish, as I heard it, was appropriate: ‘n’yuckis.’ These dreaded foodstuffs were large spongy pasty golf balls of some unidentified white substance, which definitely contained cheese (verboten).

Nyuckis were so terrible, in fact, that I completely blocked them out. It was only very recently that I ever thought to connect them with that beloved and trendy comfort food, the gnocchi (or ‘ñoquis’ as they like to call them in Buenos Aires). However far from the mark, it now seems clear to me that those nyuckis must have been an attempt (possibly successful to those over the age of five) at gnocchi.

I mean no disrespect to my mother’s cooking, she is an inventive and practiced cook who was entirely wasted on her audience. The nyuckis may very well have been a taste sensation that I simply couldn’t appreciate. I do wonder, however, if she had ever had a version of this dish before attempting to make it. (Mom?) A sense memory of the dish I'm attempting to create always makes a big difference for me, though it's far from infallible, as detailed below.

I recently found an older edition of a classic Marcella Hazan cookbook, and the most interesting thing about it is her constant lament for unavailable ingredients and implements I would now consider not only available but commonplace. She frequently gives a straight-faced explanation of something like Italian parsley, as if we might have never seen it before. In fact, the whole book is couched in the tone of a person explaining foods the reader is likely to have never seen or tasted. These days, I look at cookbooks to find out inspiration and techniques to create food I have usually already seen or tasted. At the time that book was written, though, the target audience was so unfamiliar with Italian eating that they were receiving their first introduction to these foods from the imperfect beginner versions they had just cooked.

This has advantages (joy of discovery), and pitfalls. If my entire experience of gnocchi was limited to the gnocchi di patate that I made last night, future interaction between myself and these mushy little potato dumplings might have been minimal. They weren’t terrible, just not all that great. These days, the memories of nyuckis are faint, and I’m more or less a fan of gnocchi. It isn’t my favorite pasta, but I order it a lot in restaurants because I tend to prefer whatever it’s sauced in. Gnocchi lend themselves to simple pure sauces, and that is often what I want when I want pasta.

This gnocchi recipe was an extremely simple one, consisting only of mashed potato and flour, full stop. It made adorable little dumplings, and I think with a little refining (possibly an egg yolk or some more finely whipped potatoes) it will be a success. Certainly something I plan to try again, especially as there are so many possible variations. All in all, the gnocchi were a little soggy, but entirely edible. They looked very cute with their fork tine marks on, and Jill and I ate them with simple tomato sauce and spinach sautéed with ramps (potatoes, spinach, & ramps--all local). As I learn over and over again, food doesn’t have to be perfect to be dinner. That said, my gnocchi have a long way to go, and I apologise, Mom, for the millionth time. As I cross my fingers, I hope against hope that my children will like to eat everything, and that I will be able to afford to feed them anything.