game day snacks

I am, in general, a pretty big sports fan. As a child, I may have asked my grandma to read me recipes instead of stories, but once I learned to read I also used to pour over the sports sections of Newsday every morning, obsessing over baseball standings.

So obviously, giant game-day feast, combining two of my earliest loves, hold a special place in my heart. Above, you can see my spread for Super Bowl Sunday, which Laura and Jess so kindly helped me to prepare. I basically made everything delicious and decidedly not healthy that I would want to eat at my ideal Super Bowl party, plus the markedly more elegant brie en croute. I don't know about you, but for me the menu would include guacamole, taco dip, penne alla vodka, swedish meatballs and spinach dip.

spaghetti with raisins and spinach

This pasta dish was actually spun off a couple of similar recipes that I had found for spinach with raisins and pine nuts, with almonds subbed in for their more expensive nut brethren, and spaghetti added to take this from side dish status to a full main course—aka all Sarah eats is pasta. 

beet green spaghetti with raisins/cauliflower with hazelnut, pear and sage

This is this sort of meal I miss making now, in the dead of winter. God, I can't wait for spring! When the food co-op is in full swing, our fridge is chock full of all sorts of weird veggie odds and ends, and it's both a pleasure and a challenge to use that bounty as fully and creatively as I can. For instance: you don't often see them at the grocery store, but there are a lots of vegetables that come with a bunch of leafy greens growing out of one end. Most of the time, those go to waste, which is a shame because those greens can be really tasty, whether they come from turnips, radishes or yes, even beets.

fried eggplant balls, mustard braised green beans and pancetta pappardelle with stewed tomatoes

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but this was probably one of the best dinners I made all year. Nathan helped, but this was mostly my endeavor, and both he and Laura had nothing but good things to say about the meal. When you've got some crispy fried goodness, a tasty, honest-to-goodness healthy vegetable, and a really solid pasta dish, that's pretty much a guaranteed recipe for a first rate feast.

fusilli with tuna, tomatoes and greens

This dinner came together around this delicious wasabi mayo that they serve with the tuna sandwich at Lure Fishbar. I work in the same building as Lure, and our magazine has a trade account there, which we always use to order food for meetings with different museum curators. One time, we ordered a couple of the tuna sandwiches, and they gave us a big tub of their housemade wasabi mayo to go with them.

After the lunch was over, and I successfully scavenged the leftovers, I brought home the big thing of mayo with the intentions of searing off a nice tuna steak to go with it for my dinner. Instead, I made this pasta.

baked pasta with cheese and tomatoes

Happy New Year! When I was younger, I had difficulty making resolutions, but now it seems I am full of them: decorate my apartment, keep my room in order, read more books, be less angry and stop flipping out over the little things, volunteer, make art, eat better, get some exercise, get a job with health insurance... Gah. So much room for self-improvement. Daunting, isn't it?

So I'm starting with something easy: a blog entry. Have you missed me? (No, you haven't, non-existent reader, but that's okay.) I would really like to catch up and write about all the things I cook in a more timely manner, and even though it's a daunting task, I'm feeling up to it.

red pepper hazelnut salmon

I stumble across recipes everywhere, and I never know what's going to catch my eye and get me to take a second look at one. In this instance, I think that it was probably that this roasted salmon with red pepper hazelnut pesto came from someplace called the Thyme Cafe & Market. I know that's a pretty cutesy name, but I also kind of love it. And then the recipe was an interesting sounding salmon dish with roasted red peppers, which I had in abundance from the food co-op, and toasted hazelnuts, which sounded delicious. I was sold.

As it turns out, this was actually really similar to a couple of things that I made last year: romesco sauce and pesto trapanese. If you'll recall, I actually wasn't too crazy about either of them, but I guess I just wasn't ready to give up on the idea. Somehow, every time I read a recipe with the nuts and red peppers/tomatoes combo, I just can't resist making it.

blt spaghetti

OK so this post is basically "spaghetti with tomatoes and some other stuff part two." I hope that's alright. I know that everyone who cooks regularly has their usual fall back tricks in the kitchen, and I am anything but an exception. Yes, I will admit it: I am entirely too dependent on pasta and tomatoes and garlic and cheese and onions and cracked black pepper. I just can't help myself. Can you accept me as I am? Please? OK great, thanks.

pasta with sun gold tomatoes

Hi guys. Just another little pasta dish for you all. I am nothing if not an inveterate collector of pasta recipes, as you have probably come to realize. This one appealed to me largely due to the name: pasta with sun gold tomatoes. Sun gold! How delicious does that sound? A good adjective will get me every time. For example: farm fresh. Call me a total sucker, but I am probably about 15% more likely to order something if it is described as farm fresh. Embarrassing, but true.

roasted tomato and onion pasta

You know I can't resist my spaghetti. If I don't know what to make for dinner, 75% of the time it'll wind up being up pasta. On this particular night I started out with a basket of plum tomatoes, and decided to roast them with some onions, olive oil and salt and pepper.

Of course, when they were in the oven and I was deciding what to serve with them, I fell back on that old stand by, spaghetti.

spaghetti limone/bacon wrapped pork loin

So as I mentioned in my post on zucchini, I visited my Aunt Elise and Uncle Ed when I went out to California this summer. In addition to the aforementioned vegetable, I put together quite a nice dinner, if I do say so myself.

First we had a garlic and sage crusted pork loin. That is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a big old pork loin generously seasoned and rubbed with olive oil, garlic and fresh sage. Further gilding the lily, as per Aunt Elise's excellent suggestion, I wrapped that sucker in bacon before searing it off in a frying pan and finishing it off in the oven. Gotta love that pork on pork action.

spaghetti with bacon, breadcrumbs and arugula

Nathan and I made this when he hosted our book club. The selection was Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, the discussion was riveting and the dinner... was actually better as leftovers.

When I found this recipe I was really excited. Bacon and breadcrumbs and arugula and sun dried tomatoes with spaghetti in a creamy sauce... What could possibly go wrong?

ramp carbonara

Obviously, it is September, so all good food bloggers should be writing about late summer tomatoes and peppers and plums. I am not a good food blogger. I am going to write about a delightful seasonal veggie that you can only really get for a couple of weeks out of the year, but procrastinator that I am, it'll be ramps on the menu, AKA something that was out of season by the beginning of June.

I am also a bad blogger because if you take out the ramps, I've already talked to you about this dish six times. That's right, six whole times.




So basically, if you've read my blog before ever, you know how this going to go. The only new step is slowly caramelizing the chopped ramps in the bacon fat after that we got that all nice and crispy. When I was making up the bacon and the ramps, I brought the pasta pot to boil, added salt and then tossed in the spaghetti to cook until al dente.

I actually went traditional on this one, simply tossing the cooked pasta, ramps and bacon with the beaten egg yolk, and then adding cheese. I was really excited with how good this came out. The ramps added a ton of great extra flavor, and I was very pleased to have bought them and finally sampled this spring green market special. It's a shame that we'll have to wait so long before ramps are back at the market, but I fully intend to cook more with them when they are.

cacio e pepe

This is a famous Roman pasta dish, and I love me some Roman peasant food, so you know that it was only a matter of time before I tried my hand at cacio e pepe. As you might be able to guess, cacio e pepe relies pretty heavily on two ingredients: cheese, and pepper.

I first heard about cacio e pepe about a year and a half ago, when Saveur published an issue about Classic Roman Food. That issue has some pretty amazing recipes in it: their take on carbonara, fagioli e tonno, broccoli strascinati, milk baked fennel, pork chops agrodolce, peperonata, and finally, sweet and sour cipollini onions, which I fully intend to post about soon.

When I first read the issue this pasta dish went right down on my "to make" list, but it probably won't surprise you to learn that said list is about a mile long. Cacio e pepe might have been forgotten entirely were it not for the book and movie Eat, Pray, Love. It's admittedly a little cheesy, a little over the top, female empowerment-esque, but there were definitely moments in both the novel and film that resonated with me. I would say it's probably worth reading if you are interested in spirituality and personal growth. Otherwise it might not be your thing.

Anyway, the first section of the book takes place in Italy, where the super skinny, depressed divorcee author learns to love herself by eating carbs, namely cacio e pepe. This spaghetti dish features prominently in one scene from the movie, and Saveur was kind enough to re-post the recipe from their Roman issueon their website. At the same time, Bon Appetit posted a similar recipe that also caught my fancy. I knew it was finally time to try my hand at another Roman classic.

One thing that all Roman foods seem to have in common is that they are hell of easy to prepare, and this was no exception. I actually felt that it was a little similar to carbonara, in that both traditionally create their creamy sauces without any actual cream. Cacio e pepe is actually an even more stripped down version of carbona however, replacing the hearty bacon and egg simply with pasta water and even more cheese.

The two recipes are nearly identical. One suggests a mix of pecorino romano and grana padano or parmesan, and the other wants you to mix the romano with something called cacio de roma. One has you toast your ground pepper in butter, the other in olive oil. Otherwise, the methodology is identical: toast your pepper, add pasta water, bring it to a boil, and then add your pasta and copious amounts of grated cheese. Stir it over a fairly low flame until it all melds together into one uber creamy sauce.

This pasta is not for the faint of heart: it's A LOT of cheese, and Italian cheeses can be a little overwhelming in bulk. That being said, the sauce comes together beautifully, with an impressive ease. This is definitely a great pasta sauce to have under your belt.

mac and cheese centerfold

So as I've mentioned in the past, Nathan really, really likes my mac and cheese. Honestly, I think he'd be perfectly happy if I made it for him once a week. Of course, between it being supremely unhealthy, particularly labor intensive and fairly expensive, I only make it a couple of times a year, most recently being April 19th, according to the time stamp on the photos.




It was a particularly good batch, rich and gooey, studded with some nice pork sausage. No where that I eat out seems to make mac and cheese quite the way I do, so I always enjoy my homemade rendition.

Of course, my fondness for Sarah-Cascone-brand macaroni and cheese pales in comparison to Nathan's obsession with it. In the interim between my semiannual renditions of the dish, he starts to get reaaaaaally antsy. And sure enough he's been starting to whine about how I never make him mac and cheese, accusing me of taking some sort of sick pleasure from withholding it. Needless to say, he's crazy!




However, that doesn't mean I'm necessarily going to make some more in the immediate future, so Nathan, and you, will have to make do with these photos for now. I know I can't hope to compare to the hard core food porn of some other blogs, but I think these certainly capture the gooey crunchy melty wonder that is Sarah Cascone's macaroni and cheese. Maybe, if you're lucky, you'll get to try it some day.

a tale of two carbonaras

I think if my first year of blogging taught me anything, it is that I really, really, REALLY like carbonara. I wrote about no less than FOUR different versions of the dish last year. Clearly we are talking about some serious carbonara love here.

There was my father's go-to recipe passed down from my Nona, a fancy version inspired by Joel Robouchon, one with basil and sweet corn and one with Japanese flair. These were all delicious in their own way, which only served to strengthen my appetite for carbonaras of all shapes and sizes, so to speak. As we had made my family's version, Nathan insisted we make his mom's recipe, which I believe she had gotten from a professor while she was in graduate school in Berkeley. I was, of course, more than happy to give it a try, provided I got a second chance to make mine.



Here we have the two dishes side by side. Nathan's is on the left, and if you look closely you can see it is just chock full of bacon, using about twice as much as I usually do. Mine is on the right, and the addition of non-traditional cream renders it noticeably creamier. Nathan's has onions, and mine has garlic, but they are still pretty similar to one another. I'd be happy to eat either version any day of the week, but I have to admit that I'm still slightly partial to the one I grew up with, and I'm sure Nathan feels the same.




I also have the recipes as written by my dad, Carl, and Nathan's mom, Tenli. I thought it would be fun to do a side by side of the recipes in their own words.

Tenli's Carbonara

For a pound of spaghetti or other pasta, approx 12 oz bacon or pancetta, diced fairly small.
1 medium onion, diced
1 large egg
freshly grated parmesan cheese
freshly grated pepper

Cook bacon in the bottom of a large saucepan until it starts to become crispy.
Add the onions and brown them in the bacon fat (mmm) until they are dark and caramelized. Keep an eye on things so the bacon and onions don't burn, as the grease will be very hot.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta (al dente, of course) and beat the egg lightly. When the pasta is ready, drain, and add to the saucepan with the bacon mixture, pour the egg in, and toss the whole thing well. Grate pepper over it to taste, and serve w/parmesan.



The Cascone's Carbonara

(1 or 2 servings)
– cut up bacon (¼ LB) – saute with (lots of garlic
– in bowl beat 1 egg with ~ 4 tbs milk/cream
– over cooked spaghetti – combine bacon (& some bacon oil) with egg and grated cheese and minced parsley
– [reserve some spaghetti water is too dry]




As you can see, the apple doesn't fall from the tree. I get my improvisational cooking style from my father, who probably got his from my Nona, the amazing cook behind this "recipe." With improvisation also comes the inability to describe my cooking process in any great detail. I think this recipe is written for a half pound of pasta? But I just asked my dad and he says that a half pound of bacon would be a lot for a pound of pasta, so who really knows. I think the main difference between the two recipes is really that my dad uses way way less bacon. Obviously, I freaking love bacon, but I think a little goes a long way.

Luckily, with a dish like this it is easy to get great results, even if you have to wing it a little bit. I think I've given you a number of excellent ways to make carbonara that you can really play around with. There's any number of ways to make this dish your own, and I hope you won't feel constrained by traditionalist recipes. I'd love to get my hands on some real guanciale and recreate the original Roman dish, but I'll never turn down a chance to try a new and creative variation, and I hope you won't either.

pasta palooza: assorted spaghetti

If you know anything about the way I cook, you know that I make a lot of pasta. Basically, if I don't know what to make for dinner, I will just throw whatever is in the fridge on top of spaghetti and call it a day. In addition to improvised dishes, I'm also always on the lookout for new pasta recipes. As I once said in my facebook status: "there is no such thing as too much pasta. am I right or am I right?"

Anyway, after my dearth of blog entries the past few months, I have quite a backlog of pasta dishes to tell you about. Rather than giving you a week's worth of spaghetti entries, I am going to lump a bunch of them together, linking you to the recipes that inspired me, or giving a basic description of my on the fly dishes.



First up, I have for you this recipe for spaghetti with anchovies and walnuts that ran in The New York Times last year. It appealed to me not only because it was described as a traditional part of the Italian Christmas Eve fish dinner, but also because it was actually part of their "Recipes for Health" feature. God knows we could all stand to eat healthier, and if that comes with in the form of spaghetti, chopped parsley, toasted walnuts and melted anchovies with garlic, sign me up! This was definitely yummy, undeniably easy and unexpectedly different dish. The crunchy nuts were a pleasant and very unusual touch for a pasta dish, and it was great to make since the ingredients were all things I always have on hand.



This dish was a recipe from a really trendy Brooklyn/LES restaurant called Frankie Sputino that I am kind of dying to go to. In the mean time, I've settled for a weak facsimile of their homemade cavatelli with brown butter fried sage and sausage coins.

As you can see, I did not get around to making my own cavatelli, but instead settled on small store bought shells. This made this a really easy dish. I simmered the sausage in a pan of water, and then sliced them into thin rounds which I cooked until golden brown and crispy on both sides. The sauce was really just butter, which I browned in the sausage pan to incorporate all those little brown bits that were left behind. As the pasta cooked, I fried up the sage leaves, which were ultimately tossed with the sausage, shells and brown butter sauce. Excellent, with lots of sagey goodness.



This dish was one of my own creation based, as you might guess, on what I had lying around. In this case that was onions, lemons, and fontina cheese. I slowly caramelized the onions. As the pasta was cooking, I added some of the pasta water to the onions, and squeezed in some lemon juice. Adding liquid to the pan not only created the basis for a pasta sauce, but also had the added benefit of speeding up the cooking time on my onions, which normally take a notoriously long time to caramelize. To finish the sauce, I stirred in some sliced fontina cheese, which melted nicely. With plenty of cracked black pepper, this was pretty tasty. I liked the lemony onions, and the melted fontina added a lot of flavor to the sauce.



All in all I thought that this came out pretty good. The caramelized onions were mild and delicious, and their sweetness was nicely countered by the lemon, pepper and salty cheese. A successful pasta experiment!



And here we have perhaps the best of them all: Pappardelle with Stewed Tomatoes and Pancetta. Nathan and Tenli made this last time she visited. I can take credit for finding the recipe, but not for how impressively delicious it turned out to be.

The pancetta was diced and pan fried with crushed red pepper in butter, and then a can of chopped tomatoes was added. You squeeze out all the tomato juice first though, so this turns into a nice thick sauce. From there, this dish is a total snap: add a little cream, cook a little longer, and then toss with your pappardelle, adding a little pasta water if you need to thin out the sauce.

This was incredibly rich tasting, probably from the fatty pancetta, but you know what that really means: extra delicious! Yeah, this is the kind of stick to your ribs rustic food that I just can't resist.



Here we have another kind of crazy fridge improv: basically just red cabbage + onions + grated cheese. Yeah, it was pretty straightforward, the product of a spare refrigerator.



I sliced up the onions and cabbage nice and thinly, and then cooked them in olive oil over low heat. When I mixed in the romano cheese, this made a pretty solid sauce. Though this wasn't exactly an innovation by any stretch of the imagination, it was way prettier than your average pasta dish. Purple pasta! Yay!



This last dish was probably my least favorite of all. The problem, to be honest, lay not with the pasta, which I dressed in a light lemony sauce that I will try to recreate in more detail for you later. Instead, what bothered me was the Whole Food sausage that I used, which had some appetite-killing bits of bone and cartilage hiding in there. Totally gross. Sausage should NOT be crunchy.

Basically, I used bow tie pasta, sauteed spinach and chopped up sausage, and made the sauce from lemon juice, olive oil and grated romano cheese. I did feel that it was kind of a bland sauce, but I think that I would have enjoyed it quite a bit more if it were not for the sausage. Very, very unappealing.

Overall though, I'd have to say that I've had some very successful pasta dishes as of late.

broccoli rabe with oil and garlic/fresh tomato sauce

broccoli rabe

This is simple Italian comfort food at its best. I will admit that the slight bitterness of broccoli rabe can be off-putting, and that it was years before I warmed to it. But now, slick with garlicy olive oil, sauteed broccoli rabe is one of the simplest and easiest things in the world.

This dish only has a handful of ingredients: the broccoli rabe, olive oil and garlic, plus salt and pepper and an optional sprinkling of grated cheese. Making it is a snap. Just get the olive oil nice and hot, toss in the chopped garlic, and then the broccoli rabe. It should still be dripping wet from being washed, so when you cover the pan it steams without burning. You cook it for maybe 8 to 10 minutes, until the leaves wilt and the stems soften. Once it's cooked through, season with salt and pepper and enjoy!


broccoli rabe with pasta in tomato sauce

Broccoli rabe is so hearty and filling that I like to make it a substantial part of the meal. In this particular instance, I just served it with a fresh tomato sauce over tiny pasta shells. I sprinkled both of them with romano cheese. It was straight-up simple Italian food, and it was really good. This is the kind of meal that isn't overly impressive or exciting, but that I am always happy to eat. Salty, garlicy, slightly bitter goodness.

pastina risotto

This was another meal prepared out of necessity, thanks to my broken jaw. Pastina is the smallest type of pasta around. It comes in different shapes, but I've only ever seen it in tiny little stars, which are just adorable. My mom used to make it for me all the time when I was a baby, because it is so soft and small. Obviously, it is a logical dinner choice for one who cannot chew.

Unlike regular pasta, you don't need to salt a big pot of boiling water to make pastina. It is so delicate and small that it would probably pass straight through the strainer and down into the sink if you tried to drain it in a colander. Instead, you can make pastina like risotto, adding the water little by little and stirring it consistently. It can be just as delicious as the real deal, but it takes a fraction of the time to cook, since pastina cooks to her perfection in such a short amount of time.

I made three different versions of this pastina dish, mainly because the first time it was so incredibly delicious. My parents had their own grown up dinners, but they kept sneaking bites of mine because it was just that good. Unfortunately, I was unable to quite replicate my success on the second and third go arounds. The trick to this dish is making sure to add enough liquid to keep it creamy and delicious, rather than gummy and dry.

I started by making a quick sauce with a little garlic and oil and these golden tomatoes from the food co-op. Then I added the pastina, letting it "toast" in the oil like you would risotto, and then adding some water and letting it cook in the liquid. As the pasta began to absorb the sauce, I poured in a little half and half to make sure it wouldn't dry out. After it was mostly cooked through, I put the pastina in a bowl. I stirred in some grated romano cheese, some shredded basil leaves and finally cracked an egg in and mixed it all about. The egg cooked and it became a deliciously rich and creamy dish.

This was only a few days after I had had the rubber bands put it, so solid food was still a wonder and this pastina was the best food I had eaten in weeks. Lest you think it was only good in comparison, my mom kept exclaiming how good it was and asking for more. She was really impressed with my little improvised dinner.




The next night I did much the same thing, only with red tomatoes and a big dollop of ricotta cheese. Unfortunately, I think I cooked it too long, and didn't keep it moist enough, because this turned into a bit of a gluey paste. Not at all tasty, and it was all the more unfortunate because I knew just how good it could have been.




I also made one more slight variation, trying to mix in some extra veggies. I tossed in some zucchini and corn, but the flavors all got a bit muddled and again a bit dry and overcooked. It was better than the incredibly sticky and bland red tomato sauce edition, but it just couldn't compare to the golden tomato pastina.

You can see in the photos just how much creamier the first go around looked. It really came out perfectly.




The pastina risotto method is a bit temperamental, I guess, but it's definitely worth messing around with because the results can be spectacular. Pastina may be a popular baby food, but soft food diet or not, I certainly did enjoy it. And if delicious isn't enough for you, this has also got to be the quickest pasta dish you'll ever make. Quick and easy, but totally homemade and tasty. I'd say that's pretty awesome.

spaghetti with lamb sausage and spicy tomato sauce

I'm not sure, but I might even be able to handle a meal like this these days. The doctors told me no chewing, so I've been trying to adhere to that, but I suspect that spaghetti and tiny slices of sausage would no longer be beyond my mending jaw's capabilities.



Nathan made this dinner for the two of us back in June. Even though it was perfectly delicious, he has declined to feature it in a blog post of his own. He says its too boring. But how could delicious spaghetti in a slightly spicy, onion laden tomato sauce with organic lamb sausage from the Union Square Market be boring?



Topped with grated cheese and served up with a side of sauteed spinach and some Italian bread, this so-called "boring" dinner is the kind of good eating I've been sadly deprived of for far too long.

My next doctor's visit is tomorrow, so please say a prayer that they go ahead and take all this metal out of my mouth! I'd do anything to have an unencumbered mouth for the last week of what has been an incredibly disappointing and depressing summer. Is a good Labor Day weekend too much to ask for?