Posts Tagged ‘pasta’

I’m going out on a limb here by saying I don’t like vodka, so the idea of vodka sauce never really appealed to me. I couldn’t imagine it tasting good with pasta.  A few days ago, my friend Karen brought some really yummy spinach and cheese stuffed gnocchi with vodka sauce for her lunch. Of course I tried it and thought it was delicious.  I was thinking about trying a new recipe for dinner this week and decided to give the vodka sauce a try.  I searched for a few recipes online and ended up using one from cooks.com. I changed a few things as I went along and kept my fingers crossed.  It was a very simple recipe and tasted really, really good.

Ingredients

• 1 cup vodka
• 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (I skipped this, but may try it next time)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3/4 pound prosciutto, chopped (I used 4 thin slices of pancetta instead)
• 2 large cloves garlic, minced
• 1 medium shallot, minced
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
• 2 (8 ounce) cans tomato sauce
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
• 1 cup heavy cream

Directions

1. In a small bowl, combine vodka and red pepper flakes. Set aside for 1 hour.(see note above)
2. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat.
3. Saute pancetta, garlic, shallots, salt and pepper until pancetta is evenly browned.
4. Pour in vodka mixture, and simmer 10 minutes.
   
5. Add tomatoes, and stir in with 2 cans of tomato sauce, parsley and basil.
   
6. Simmer 15 minutes.
7. Stir in 1 cup heavy cream, and cook 2 minutes.
   

   

My Notes:
1 cup of vodka seemed like a lot, so I cut it back to 3/4 cup.  After tasting the sauce, I will try it with the recommended 1 cup next time.  Zoe was eating with us tonight, so I did not add the crushed pepper flakes.  Jose and Jason both said they’d like it with a bit of heat, so I may add them to the vodka next time, like the recipe states. I did not have prosciutto so I used thinly sliced pancetta instead. Next time, I’ll use a chunk so I can dice it better, but it worked out ok. I did not add the 1 cup of water because the sauce would have been too runny.  I recommend keeping it handy just in case the sauce needs to be thinned out.  Also, I am not sure 2 cans of tomato sauce are needed. I’m not even sure one is.  I would cut back to one can, and then try it with out any and see if it makes a difference.  Finally, in my photo you see half and half.  After I took the photo, I realized I had heavy cream in the fridge so I DID use that as the recipe stated.

Ciao!

Today I decided to make one of the dishes I had in Italy last year.  It was penne with eggplant, tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and basil. It was delicious (as was most of the food we had!) and I’ve been thinking about it lately as a nice, summery meal.  Today I was at the Farmer’s Market and the eggplants looked nice, so I thought it was time to try.

Here’s a photo of the original dish from Capri, ItalyI’m not including the recipe here yet because I haven’t perfected it, but I will give you the details about my attempt.  The first thing I did (and did incorrectly) was to cube the eggplant.  I cut mine into too small cubes AND I didn’t use the skin.  I couldn’t remember if the dish had the eggplant skin so I removed it from my pieces and later when I consulted the photo, the skin was used.  The biggest problem with my version was that I waaaaaay overcooked the eggplant.  Perhaps not having the skin affected the cooking time or I just plain old overcooked it.  Either way, it wasn’t great.

I also didn’t get the lovely, deep color that is shown in the above photo. I think this is an olive oil problem. I imagine the quality of the Italian olive oil is much better than the extra virgin olive oil I’m using. I’m going to look for a high end, really amazing quality olive oil for finishing dishes. Any suggestions on brands?

The last thing that affected the final taste was the use of grape tomatoes instead of Roma tomatoes.  I just don’t like the taste of large chunks of cooked tomato and I LOVE grape tomatoes.  In the end, the grape tomatoes were too sweet and completely altered the taste of the dish. I also added sliced mushrooms because I thought they would fit right into this dish, and they did.  Here’s attempt #1.

See the mushy eggplant blobs (can’t even call them cubes) in this photo?

This sounds all doom and gloom, but the dish was really tasty, just not a perfect re-creation of the one I was attempting. For try #2 I will adjust the size of the eggplant chunks (and cook it LATER in the veggie sauteing process), use Roma tomatoes and find a better quality olive oil.  I also used a smooth penne instead of penne rigate with the ridges.