Asparagus and Ricotta Ravioli with Favas and Sage Brown Butter
Never mind that the recipe was probably one of the easiest I’ve ever followed. A year ago, if you asked me whether I ever thought about making my own ricotta cheese I would have laughed, crinkling my brow like a concerned mother in a movie, and said plainly: no, never.
As frequent readers of SpicySaltySweet can attest, I do like making dishes from scratch. In fact, I get quite the kick out of deconstructing things I used to take for granted. A few years back I made a soupy mess that was my excuse for Greek yoghurt. I’ve made my own butter. I make fresh pasta almost weekly now. But cheese? Cheese is something spiritual—a vehicle for transcendence that no mere home cook could possibly concoct in her kitchen.
But when I stumbled across Julia Moskin’s article about ricotta in the New York Times two weeks ago, I became convinced that making my own would not require divine intervention.
Last Thursday was the Vernal Equinox, the day in the Northern Hemisphere when the night and day are essentially the same length. It is also the official start of spring and my second favorite time of year after fall. But living in Southern California, it’s easy to get a little detached from the seasons—the daffodils, cherry blossoms and tulips started blossoming at the end of February and I’ve returned to wearing flip flops most days—but I find that cooking always keeps me in time with the earth’s clock. Feeling springy, I decided to host “Easter” dinner for a few friends, a slightly surprising turn of events since I’m Jewish. Yet no sooner was the guest list confirmed than I found out I was supposed to work Sunday brunch at the restaurant I’ve been moonlighting at. Rather than cancel I decided to pick a simple menu, prep Saturday and have Neal do a bunch of the cooking while I was at work.
Egg Papardelle with Bagna Cauda, Wilted Radicchio and an Olive Oil-Fried Egg
I’m a culinary masochist. It’s taken me awhile to come to terms with this, but a few recent cooking endeavors have made the truth difficult to avoid. The facts are, perhaps, best exemplified by my new favorite cookbook: Nancy Silverton’s A Twist of the Wrist. Nancy’s book is designed to help home cooks create gourmet meals using the bevy of high-quality pre-packaged ingredients lining the grocer’s shelves. Sounds great, right? Used correctly, these jars, boxes and tins are timesaving complements to Nancy’s delicious, well-thought-out recipes. But in my DIY-addled brain I see Nancy’s timesaving devices as the opportunity to try making other, more time-consuming components from scratch. At my house, a meal from Nancy’s book that’s supposed to take a half an hour suddenly takes three— Continue reading »
Butternut Squash, Asiago & Walnut Ravioli with Brown Butter
Why are people so willing to start off the New Year with pie-in-the-sky expectations—thinking New Year’s Eve is going to be some transformational event—only to go to a large party, get sloppy drunk and end up in bed with a stranger? No wonder New Year’s is always a disappointment? I’m not trying to be Negative Nancy here, it just seems our New Year’s traditions are, shall I say, a little lacking.
What we know as New Year’s Eve is, essentially, an arbitrary designation made by two Roman consuls in 153 BC. Before that, the holiday was celebrated on March 15. And there are plenty of cultures that don’t even follow the Roman calendar, celebrating their New Year in the fall like Rosh Hashana—the Jewish New Year, or February, like the Chinese.
Normally, having spent much of my adult life in the restaurant business, I work on New Year’s Eve. The money is fantastic and, unlike my non-working friends, I wake up January 1st feeling refreshed. But at the beginning of December my dear friend Brooke, of Foodwoolf, and I were eating lunch at Joan’s On Third, when our cheese-pusher, Chester, mentioned he’d just gotten in the sausage for a traditional Italian New Year’s dish, cotechino con lenticche—cotechino with lentils. Continue reading »
My ravioli fell apart. And when my ravioli fell apart, little bits of herbed Laura Chenel goat cheese, Parmigiano-Reggiano and mascarpone slipped out, clouding the salted water I was boiling them in and coating the inner-edges of the pot with tufts of cheese that looked like dirty snow.I’m going to blame it on the wonton wrappers, but in all likelihood it was just me. I’d never made ravioli by hand before I taking on the Goat Cheese Ravioli with Bell Peppers and Brown Butter recipe from Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s Restaurant Bonne Soirée, featured in the September 2007 issue of Bon Appétit. Continue reading »
