The Boys are Back in Town

With apologies to Thin Lizzy, the boys are finally back in town, having moved back from Boulder after a short stay there. We were devastated when they decided to move while we were away in Italy in the fall and we are ecstatic that they missed Bend so much that they have decided to return.

Naturally, to celebrate their return, we had them to dinner. For this dinner, Ann wanted me to do pasta with ragù bolognese and she wanted to make garlic bread, especially because Rob loves garlic bread.

The Three Musketeers

Kitchen Elf Extraordinaire!

Spying a bin of small tomatoes on the counter where I leave them to ripen sparked an idea for a simple appetizer, mini-Capreses on skewers. Nothing could be simpler than skewering tomatoes, basil leaves, and bocconcini and drizzling them with a bit of pesto thinned with olive oil.

Caprese Skewers

We waffled on making a traditional lasagne (I should have, damn it!) but I let Ann convince me that I should just used boxed pasta rather than rolling out a sfoglia and cutting it into big sheets for lasagne. We ended up with par-cooked mezzo rigatoni (from Giuseppe Cocco) mixed with ragù and a bit of ricotta, topped with mozzarella and baked until golden brown. It was good, but not great and certainly not in the same league as lasagne.

Baked Mezzo Rigatoni and Ragù Bolognese

Ann wanted to make garlic bread as a surprise for Rob, whose predilection for this delicious carb we noticed in Santa Fe. She concocts a mixture of butter, mayonnaise, granulated garlic, fresh garlic, and a bit of Italian parsley and slathers obscene amounts on a split loaf of excellent bread. After it browns under the broiler, it is absolutely irresistible and makes the house smell amazing. I can gain weight just by looking at photos of it.

Ann's Crazy Good Garlic Bread

After kibbitzing for an hour or so and catching up with the boys and their move back to town, we relocated to the dining room and finished up the evening with a couple bottles of delicious Langhe Nebbiolo.

Morocco via Marseilles

It's not a big secret that I love the food of North Africa; at the restaurant, my tasting menus often included dishes from or in homage to Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. I find the use of spices fascinating and second only in the world to Indian cooking, another love of mine. North African cuisine also relies heavily on my favorite style of cooking, the braise, in the form of its ubiquitous tagines. Tagines are stews, essentially, cooked in the flat earthenware dish with the conical lid which gave its name to the dish.

Ann and Michelle

And I am a big student and lover of French provincial cooking, the more rustic dishes of the countryside versus the haute cuisine of Paris and the Michelin-starred restaurants. Provence, as a region, really excites my palate with its broadly Mediterranean cuisine, a far cry from the more pan-European cuisine of Paris and the north. I have fond memories of eating exciting and for me at the time, novel, dishes in Aix, Nice, Cassis, and Marseille.

What do these two regions on opposite sides of the bright sunny blue Mediterranean have to do with each other? A lot, as it turns out. People and their food have been coming and going across the water from continent to continent for millennia. And as people and cultures have mixed, each side of the sea has influenced the other in innumerable ways. The second language of the North African nations is French and the second cuisine of the south of France is North African, interpreted through the French lens. Highly spiced tajines, for example, are widespread along the Mediterranean coast of France.

I am always truly fascinated how distinct cuisines meet across political boundaries to inform each other. Think of Tex-Mex or the Polish influence in Pittsburgh and the Rust Belt. The mixing of African and French cooking to form une cuisine afro-française delights me.

We had new friends Andreas and Michelle over for dinner last evening and in the process of brainstorming the menu, Ann was pushing in the Moroccan direction. This naturally had me thinking of a tajine. And then I remembered a subtly spiced chicken tajine that I had once in Provence spiced merely with cumin, garlic, and olives. I would make a version of this tajine but naturally, I would make it my own, adding both saffron and preserved lemons to the dish in my food memory for a subtle, yet complex dish.

What to serve with a tajine? Well, naturally, one would make a very plain couscous to soak up all the delicious braising juices. But a dietary restriction precluded any gluten in the dinner. Ann suggested (she's very good at helping me to focus in my menu-making) panisse, the delightful chickpea French fry replacements from Marseille, the major French port on the Med. Why not panisse? It and other chickpea flour dishes (such as socca from Nice) are so common to Provence though they are likely to originate from another close neighbor, Italy.

That left one more dish for the menu, a side salad. Chopped tomato salads are common across the entire Mediterranean from North Africa to the Levant and back through Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, and France. Everyone has a simple salad of chopped tomatoes simply dressed. I thought to make a Moroccan version spiced with cumin until a sachet of fennel pollen arrived in the mail the afternoon of our dinner. Fennel pollen would make a tremendous substitute for cumin. And with that, the menu was largely set: panisses, tomato salad, and chicken and olive tajine.

Any time we have people over for dinner for the first time, I like to set a menu of dishes that I can execute in advance so that I can spend my time socializing rather than cooking. We save guest participation dinners for those who like to cook for future gatherings. However, Ann conveyed to me that Andreas was really into cooking or at least seeing some cooking, to pick the mind of a chef, and so Ann and I did minimal prep beforehand and left much of the actual cooking for after Andreas and Michelle arrived.

Cooking Chickpea Flour for Panisses

Bartender Annie Pre-Mixing a Batch of  Cocktails

About a week before the dinner, I started the process of preserving a lemon, cutting it into lengthwise quarters, coating it in salt mixed with a touch of cinnamon and thyme, and covering the whole with some kalamata olive brine (rather than lemon juice). I used to keep big batches of preserved lemons in the refrigerator, but they take up too much space, so now I just make them to order. They will cure fairly well in a week on the counter, but two weeks is better.

As an aside, we used to make preserved lemons (and dozens of other pickles) in huge containers at the restaurant and pray that the health inspector would not come in during the two-week period that we left them on the counter before refrigerating them. Health inspectors are notoriously bad at overlooking food items that are traditionally not refrigerated: butter, eggs, cured hams, cheeses, and all manner of pickles including sauerkraut and preserved lemons.

Also, I made a batch of harissa, the super spicy chile and spice paste that is ever so common in North Africa, especially Tunisia. I did not know when I made the batch what I would use it for other than as a condiment to accompany the tajine. I have made my own harissa for so long now that I can barely remember the process of reading through recipes for it and trying a bunch of commercial versions to come up with my own version.

One thing I don't like in a lot of commercial versions is a dependence on tomatoes or tomato paste in the sauce. If it's supposed to be a chile sauce, why use tomato as a filler? And so my version came over time to be a mixture of crushed red ripe jalapeños (easily available in the US), smoked paprika, spicy Hungarian paprika, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, a pinch of cinnamon, and spices. For my spices, I add texture to the sauce by leaving half of the spices whole. My spices include roughly equal parts of fennel, caraway, and cumin. The whole spices soften after about a week while all the flavors marry in the refrigerator. In my not so humble opinion, my harissa beats any that I have ever tasted.

Later in the week when talking with Ann about the menu, she clarified for me that her idea was to serve the panisse as a first course rather than as a couscous replacement with the main course. I loved that and immediately thought that we needed a dipping sauce for the crunchy sticks of cooked chickpea flour. Out of seemingly nowhere, the idea of harissa aïoli jumped into my mind and so the sauce issue and how I would use the harissa were settled.

Early yesterday morning, I ground a bunch of cumin and chopped a lot of garlic which I mixed with olive oil to make a paste. I then rubbed this paste into a batch of chicken thighs and put them in the refrigerator to marinate all day until needed at dinner time. Next, I pounded out a couple of cloves of garlic into a paste in my big green granite mortar and made a batch of plain aïoli that I flavored with a bunch of harissa to give a spicy sauce the color of Russian dressing.

After that, I made a batch of batter for the panisses by whisking water, salt, and olive oil into chickpea flour, bringing it a boil while stirring, then cooking over low heat while stirring constantly for ten minutes. Finally, I would spread the super thick batter into a greased dish to cool to room temperature on the counter. My basic recipe is roughly 250g of chickpea flour to a liter of water with a teaspoon of Kosher salt and a drizzle of olive oil. This is the perfect amount to put into a 9"x9" brownie pan.

In the afternoon, Ann mixed up a bunch of her Oaxacan Old Fashioneds (reposado tequila, mezcal, bitters, and agave nectar). She also rimmed four coupes with smoked salt, meaning that all she had to do when Andreas and Michelle arrived was to chill the drinks and strain into the cups. 

Panisse with Harissa Aïoli

When our guests arrived, I fired two frying pans on the cooktop, one for browning the chicken and one for frying the panisse. While the first batch of chicken was browning, I flipped the panisse cake onto my cutting board and cut it into fingers which Andreas and I fried in olive oil to crispy goodness.

While everyone was enjoying dipping these crunchy fingers into the spicy aïoli, I drained the excess oil from the chicken pan and added diced onion, preserved lemon, and saffron. The onions cooked until translucent at which point I added both green and black olives, both pitted, and moistened the mixture with a bit of chicken stock. Once the sauce was boiling rapidly, I poured it over the chicken which went into a 400F oven, covered, until the chicken was tender, about an hour.

Star of the Show: Tomato Salad

Between sips of wine and while the chicken was cooking, I made a quick tomato salad. It is so hard to get decent tomatoes in this part of Oregon, so I rely on grape tomatoes year round. They aren't awesome, but they aren't bad either. After splitting the tomatoes in half, I minced a quarter of a red onion and a big handful of Italian parsley from the farmers market. These I mixed into the salad with the juice of a lemon, some olive oil, salt, black pepper, and a big sprinkle of fennel pollen.

Fennel pollen is something that I used to use frequently at the restaurant, mainly by sprinkling it over a finished dish. There is something special about a big piece of roasted Striped Bass garnished with a slug of great olive oil, a grating of lemon zest, a sprinkle of coarse salt, and a sprinkle of fennel pollen.

Fennel pollen is exactly what it sounds, the dried pollen from fennel plants created by harvesting fennel blooms, letting them dry, and then shaking them to release the pollen. Fennel pollen is wickedly expensive but its unique and inimitable flavor makes it so worth the price. And a very little goes a long way as it is extremely flavorful. At first taste, the flavor is clearly of fennel, like fennel seed. But unlike fennel seed, the flavor is stronger, deeper, richer and finishes with a delightful fruitiness. Get you some today and play with it. You are guaranteed to fall in love with it as much as Ann and I have.

I had not set out to create a salad that would upstage every other thing that we ate or drank, but that was the happy result of substituting fennel pollen for cumin. Everyone was blown away by this simple salad. I will never forget it. The combination of fennel pollen and tomatoes yields a result that is far, far greater than the sum of the two parts. Happy, happy belly!

Chicken and Olive Tagine

Once the chicken was tender, I pulled it out of the oven and placed it on the stovetop where I boiled it rapidly to evaporate and concentrate the braising liquid. The result as you see in the photo above was as delicious as it was simple. To recap, the chicken was marinated in cumin and garlic, browned, and mixed with onions cooked in olive oil with saffron and preserved lemon to which I added green and black olives and chicken stock.

Ann, Andreas, Michelle

Kitchen Basics: Poaching Shrimp

It's summer now, even in Bend, Oregon where it last snowed on June 19th of this year, and our palates are turning towards cooler dishes and to raw ingredients. Last night, after waiting nearly a week for our avocados to ripen, I made a quick salad of fresh tomatoes, raw corn, diced avocados, and poached shrimp. I imagine this salad has been made millions of times; there's nothing special about it save for perhaps how I poach my shrimp.

Tomato, Corn, and Avocado Salad with Poached Shrimp

This is a perfect dish to illustrate poaching seafood using a court bouillon, a classic flavored and acidulated poaching liquid, one of the foundations of French seafood cookery.

Although I have specified a recipe below, at the end of the day, we're talking about a salad and salads are nothing if not fungible. That is, you should feel free to adjust this any way that you want. Want a higher proportion of tomatoes? Add them. Don't like cilantro? Maybe use Italian parsley. Don't have a red onion in the pantry? Use green ones instead. Want to add toasted macadamia nuts? Do it. Hopefully, you get the idea.

Tomato, Corn, and Avocado Salad with Poached Shrimp

1 dry pint of small salad tomatoes, halved or quartered depending on size
3 ears of sweet corn, kernels shaved off
4 medium or 2 large avocadoes, diced
1/4 of a medium red onion diced, about a 1/2 a cup
1/2 cup of cilantro leaves
1 pound of poached and cooled medium peeled shrimp
juice of one large lime
2 tablespoons salad oil (I used extra virgin)
salt to taste

Mix all ingredients. Taste and adjust seasoning. Serve immediately so that avocados do not brown. Serves two amply as a main course or four to six people for an appetizer. This would also make a great filling for lettuce wraps.

Poaching Shrimp in Court Bouillon

I call for a sachet for the spices in the court bouillon so that you don't have to pick the spices out of the shrimp before you use them in your salad. You are, of course, welcome to pick them out but don't blame me if you get grumpy about it.

2 quarts of water
1/4 cup of rice vinegar
2 tablespoons Kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1 cheesecloth sachet containing:

1 clove garlic, sliced

1 teaspoon coriander seeds

1 teaspoon allspice berries

1/2 teaspoon brown or yellow mustard seeds

pinch crushed red pepper flakes

Bring all the ingredients to a slight boil and let them cook for 5-10 minutes to really flavor the court bouillon. Raise the heat to a rolling boil and add the shrimp. When the court bouillon comes back to the boil, turn off the heat and walk away. After 15 minutes or so, the shrimp will be cooked and more importantly, will have picked up a bit of the flavorings.

You can use the shrimp warm, allow them to cool in the broth to room temperature, or drain them and refrigerate for later use cold. Me, I like to cool them to room temperature in the court bouillon and add to the other room temperature ingredients in my salad.

Chickpea Salad with Yogurt Dressing

Chickpea Salad with Yogurt Dressing

This post is mostly a note to myself to remember this salad, because Ann really loved it. I made it last evening from odds and ends I had in the kitchen that needed to be used. It's a two-part salad, the base of which is arugula tossed with lemon juice, olive oil, and salt. The chickpea salad on top is chickpeas, olives, green onions, and grape tomatoes tossed in a yogurt-based dressing.

The dressing, very much a spur of the moment thing, is plain Greek yogurt flavored with garlic, cumin, and salt, spiced with chipotle adobo, and thinned with water. If I were making a true Mediterranean-inspired dressing, I would have used some other kind of spice, such as Urfa or Aleppo pepper, or even a bit of harissa, but I have a can of chipotles open in the refrigerator that needs to be used.

Update: I have cooked so much food in my life that I have forgotten much of what I have done. In cruising through old posts, I came across a recipe for this dressing that I published back in 2020. I totally forgot about it.

Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Tuna may be the ultimate fish (though in my book, a big slab of Striped Bass is right up there). And it would be a terrible understatement to say that I am picky about my tuna. At the restaurant, I handled a very great deal of very high quality tuna and so most of what I see at the store is several notches below what I used to serve to my customers. Every now and again, which is to say quite rarely, I see a piece of tuna at the store that looks good enough to bring home. As it did back at the end of March.

How to cook tuna is never in question for me. Like scallops, the less cooked it is, the better. If I am going to cook it at all, I will either briefly sear it or lightly grill it, just trying to cook the outer surface. Given that our weather was really cold, I decided to pan-sear this piece rather than to unbury the grill from its mantle of snow.

Here in lovely Bend, Oregon, spring is still a long ways off (with a bunch of snow in our long-range forecast) and yet I yearn for the warmer days. To help put myself in that frame of mind, I thought a really simple chopped salad might just be the ticket.

My so-called Mediterranean salad is grape tomatoes, cucumbers, thinly-sliced red onions, a touch of minced garlic, Italian parsley, and toasted pine nuts. The "dressing" is a simple squeeze of fresh lemon juice, a drizzle of olive oil, and a pinch of Kosher salt.

It's hard to imagine a better warm weather light dinner, even if it is served with snow on the ground!

Pranzo di Ferragosto

A few weeks ago when Greg and Bridget visited from Portland and we went wine tasting at nearby Maysara Winery in the McMinnville AVA, they had discussed the possibility of Ann and I celebrating Ferragosto with them the weekend after we returned from Alaska. This was the first time that I, or my full-blooded Italian wife, had ever heard of Ferragosto, the Italian Feast of Assumption celebrated on the 15th of August.

Having been in the software business with an Italian distributor, I did recognize that much of the country (a lot of Europe too) takes August (or a large chunk of it) off, but I was ignorant that there was a mid-month celebration. Deconstructing the term, I recognized ferr (as in the French jours fériés, holidays, feast days, celebrations) and agosto (the month of August after Augustus Caesar). 

The plan was that on the 15th of August, we would get together at Greg and Bridgets's house in Portland, watch the film Pranzo di Ferragosto, one of Bridget's favorite flicks, pop our pranzo into the oven, then dine on the two principal dishes from the film. Greg would make the fish dish and asked me to make the pasta. He sent me recipes for both dishes.

I'm not a recipe guy and in making Pasta al Forno, baked pasta, a dish I have made countless times, while I kind of adhered to the spirit of the recipe, I felt free to do my own thing. And I noticed that Greg did his own take on the perch and potato dish, doing halibut with a covering of white sweet potatoes instead. My meat sauce is made from a bit of home-made sausage, a bit of pancetta, and I augmented the mirepoix with reconstituted dried porcini. I added the porcini broth to the sauce as it cooked down.

Ingredients for my Ragù

Cooking Down the Meat Sauce

One Layer of Pasta, One of Mozzarella

Final Layer of Pasta, Then Pecorino Romano

When we arrived, we met their friends Will and Corinne, down for the weekend from Seattle where Greg and Bridget had lived prior to relocating to Portland. After introductions, we went downstairs to the wine cellar where they had laid out a beautiful array of cheese, charcuterie, and crudités which we enjoyed with sparkling wine.

After appetizers and sparkling wine, we watched Pranzo di Ferragosto, a charming film, if a little short. While the movie was nominally about a guy who gets hoodwinked into babysitting four elderly women, his mother included, while everyone else deserted Rome for the holiday, I found it to be primarily a love story about the main character's home of Rome. Certainly Rome is a major character in a movie full of characters, played largely by non-actors.

Back upstairs after the film, we put the pasta and the fish in the oven to cook and yakked for a good while. Once the two pre-prepared dishes had baked, we relocated to the dining room and started our own feast, followed by Corinne's arugula and fig salad, and then finishing with a delicate fig cake from a local Russian bakery. It's really a lot of fun to sit around a dinner table and chat over a lengthy meal, something that we don't do nearly enough of.

Cold Dish for a Hot Day

Ahi Tataki on Salad of Sugar Snaps, Tomatoes, and Corn

What to eat on a very hot day? Something cold and fresh. This salad really hit the spot and represents everything I have learned as a chef about simplicity and letting ingredients shine.

I knew I hit the mark when Ann asked the question on eating the salad, "What did you do to this?" I replied "Nothing." When you have ingredients this fresh and high quality, you don't have to do a thing. Learning this lesson has taken decades.

A new trick for an old chef. I have learned (perhaps re-learned) this summer that if you put a quick blister on sugar snaps, you can coax the peas into a deliciousness that tops even their totally raw state. Very many sugar snaps have never even made it home this spring from the farmers market, having been snacked by Ann and me on the walk home. That's how delicious they are totally raw.

To make them even better, I heat a pan over blazing heat, generally on the grill outside. Just as I'm ready to cook, a touch of oil (in this case, sesame) goes into the pan, and then the peas go in to sit for a few seconds to char the pods a bit, and then are tossed with a sprinkle of salt until the pods go from raw green to bright green all over, a minute or so. The result is still nearly raw (certainly the peas inside the pods remain raw) and beguilingly delicious.

The salad in the photo above adds halved small tomatoes and raw shaved corn. On top of this are slices of tuna that I seared in the cast iron pan after the peas came out. A sprinkle of really good salt finishes the dish. Sublime.

Arroz con Pollo Soup

One of my favorite meals is arroz con pollo, the dish of baked chicken and rice. I made it frequently for staff meals at the restaurant and it is one of my go-to dishes when I want comfort. It's turned cold here in Oregon (heretofore, our winter has been extremely mild as is usual) and that's got me wanting both hot soup and comfort.

I was going to make a salad a couple nights ago, but the weather turned against that, as did Ann, who in rebelling against the salad idea said, "I want soup." In going through the refrigerator, I saw leftover chicken, chicken stock, and diced Anaheim chiles from our Super Bowl chicken chile tostadas.

I started craving arroz con pollo, but with only a few ounces of cooked chicken on hand, I wasn't equipped to make it. But in response to Ann's request, I could make a killer soup from the leftovers that would taste identical to arroz con pollo.

Arroz con Pollo Soup

Soffritto for Soup

I started by warming the leftover chicken, stock, and chiles with a can of tomatoes while I prepped the vegetables for the soffritto: a yellow onion, half a bunch of green onions, a bunch of cilantro, a yellow pepper, a poblano, and eight cloves of garlic. I sautéed all these veg with a big pinch of saffron until the onions started to go translucent. Into the stock pot they went to simmer for a half an hour. I seasoned the soup with salt and sambal oelek (crushed red jalapeños) and then tossed in two big handfuls of rice to cook in the broth.

I would typically make this dish with achiote instead of saffron, but I don't have any achiote. Achiote was very common and cheap on the East Coast where a lot of our immigrants came from the Yucatán, the Caribbean, and other eastern locales where achiote is king. Out west, there doesn't appear to be the demand for achiote and I cannot find it anywhere, hence the saffron. I'm sure I can find it in Portland, but who wants to drive in from wine country and deal with that traffic?

This soup hit all the right notes: arroz con pollo flavor and soup comfort with just the right amount of sinus clearing spice. What a great soup!

Snowy Day Soup

Two days ago we were going to have turkey-vegetable soup, but being in a bit of a celebratory mood, I changed my mind and decided to make pappardelle con ragù, saving the soup for yesterday. And I'm so glad I did. It started snowing mid-morning and did not let up until after dark. If ever there were a list of days for a bowl of warm and comforting soup, a snowy day would be close to the top of the list.

A Perfect Soup Day

As transplanted easterners, we were delighted to see the snow. Snow here on the valley floor is rare. Sure, the tens and tens of feet of snowpack in the Cascades and in the Coast Range is impressive, but on a year-in-year-out basis, we don't get snow down here at only 150 feet of elevation. In fact, on most days this January, I have been wearing short pants during our daily walks. This mild Mediterranean climate lets us grow figs and olives with near impunity and causes our rosemary to explode into large shrubs. But it causes some of us who grew up with snow to miss the winter season, especially the bright red cardinals silhouetted against the snow.

Turkey Vegetable Soup

Why is soup so comforting? I think it is instinctive in humans to make soup for warmth and comfort. Why else do we turn to soup naturally when we are unwell? I don't think the higher part of our brain is actually involved; it is my private hypothesis that humans have been making soup for eons and at some primal level, know instinctively that it is simultaneously warming, nourishing, comforting, and hydrating, all things we desire when we feel ill or in need of comfort.

Theories aside, I try to make soup frequently in the winter. This winter, my go-to soup is turkey-vegetable. I bought a case of turkey necks from the grocery store just after the holidays when the meat manager was delighted to move them out of his freezer and into my cart.

Making soup is a two-day process. The first day, I roast the turkey necks (and in this case, the detritus from a chicken carcass) to golden brown, then deglaze the roasting pan, and simmer all the roasted meats and bones for a few hours to extract all the goodness. Into the fridge the stockpot goes to set up so that I can remove all the fat from the top the next day.

Then I rewarm everything, pull the meat and bones out, pick all the meat, and add the meat and vegetables back to the stock. The soup cooks for 15-20 minutes just before we want to eat so that the vegetables retain their texture.

This soup contains tomatoes, onions, leeks, carrots, celery, kale, black-eyed peas, stelline pasta, rehydrated porcini mushrooms, and a swirl of pesto at the end.

Pappardelle con Ragù

Our waistlines continue to shrink and I'm at the point where I really want to slow the loss. I was at the grocery store this morning with a plan to make turkey-vegetable soup for dinner, but I felt like we should celebrate a little tonight with a nice meal and a bottle of wine. Nothing was really coming to mind, but when I walked by one of the meat cases, I saw some country-style pork ribs, pork shoulder by any other name, that triggered a memory of ragù, meat sauce.

I thought it would be a wonderful treat on a very cold and rainy (34F and raining is the pits) day to have a warm bowl of pappardelle with meat sauce. And so it was, incredibly delicious, but probably too much quantity and definitely too rich. I made the sauce in a single enameled cast iron cocotte in oven with the whole process taking about 6 hours.

Pappardelle con Ragù

Browning Pork in the Cocotte

Browning the Flip Side

Braised for 2.5 Hours in White Wine and Water

Soffritto Sautéed with Garlic and Basil; Deglazed with White Wine; Meat Added

Tomatoes Added; Ready for Oven

Ragù Ready After Braising for Two Hours

Annie Coloring Outside the Well

Pasta Resting for An Hour

Rolling Out the Dough

Pappardelle Drying Before Cooking

Basic Egg Pasta Dough

Basic egg pasta is simple to make. The following makes plenty for two people.

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

2 whole large eggs

2 egg yolks

Mix the flour and salt and form a pile with a well in it. Crack the eggs into the well. Add a drizzle of olive oil if you like. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. Beat the eggs in the center of the well and slowly incorporate the flour from the edges of the well until all the flour is incorporated into the dough. Add little dribbles of water if the dough is too stiff. Knead for several minutes until the dough is smooth and evenly colored. Allow the dough to rest, covered, for at least 30 minutes before rolling and cutting.