 Dear readers, What dish do you make when you return from a trip, and all you want is something quick, nourishing, and easy to throw together with ingredients already in the pantry? For many of us, pasta fits the bill. Giovanna Zivny makes Pasta with Anchovies, Parsley, and Breadcrumbs. If she’s got a few extra minutes, Carrie Floyd whips up a family favorite, Pasta Raphael Nouvelle. Sprezzatura Pasta is a good bet if you’ve got chard in the garden, just waiting to be eaten. Me, I take my cues from James Beard and his book Beard on Pasta. One of my favorite dishes in the book, Quick Tuna Sauce, is hardly a recipe at all: “Warm 1/2 cup olive oil with a clove of garlic. Dump in a 7-ounce can of tuna, and break it up with a fork. Then add a lot of chopped parsley, heat through, and pour over the pasta. Add a few chopped Greek olives if you have them.” We don’t have Marcella Hazen’s famous tomato sauce on Culinate — the one that contains just four ingredients: tomatoes, butter, onion, and salt — but it’s easy enough to find elsewhere on the web. Beard’s recipe for Light Tomato Sauce is similar to Hazen’s classic, although instead of adding a whole onion at the beginning of cooking and then removing it at the end, he adds sliced onion, cooks it with the tomatoes, and then purées the whole lot together before serving. I love the ease, simplicity, and taste of both Beard’s and Hazen’s tomato sauces — and I appreciate the way they stick to your ribs. But though you may be tempted, don’t skimp on the butter in either recipe; you won’t want to miss out on the beauty it adds. Kim Carlson
Editorial Director |
