The Guts

Since I started cooking my way through Giada de Laurentiis' Everyday Italian, I've made over twenty dishes but hadn't even cracked the sauce or vegetable chapters yet. Plus, that means I still have about 95 recipes to go, and at my rate of about one per week it will take me two years to get through all of them. With that in mind, I feel like, after all my attempts at some of the peripheral dishes like White Bean Tuna Salad and Citrus Biscotti, I'm starting now to get into the guts of the book.

Marinara Sauce: As promised, I finally made Giada's basic marinara sauce, which I could then use in a myriad of other dishes. This worked out pretty well. With prep and cooking, it takes about an hour and a half to make what's supposed to yield 8 cups of sauce. Chunky and slightly sweet with carrots, onions and celery, it still felt a bit watery when ladled over spaghetti. And I could barely taste the garlic and surmised that two cloves might not be enough for 2 quarts of sauce. It also would have helped had I seasoned the vegetables better before adding the crushed tomatoes, but overall this easy recipe actually produces about 6 cups of a B+/A- sauce. With this made, I could then move on to...

Tuna with Tomato Sauce: I know, I know. Canned tuna with pasta? Gross. But bear with me here. If you don't like tuna, this probably won't change your mind. But if you do, tuna simmered with marinara, capers, lemon zest and parsley is a fresh change of pace from the usual pasta dishes. Granted, this, along with the following recipes, probably amounts to peasant food, where Italian grandmothers tossed whatever they had in their pantry into a pan and then had to figure out what to do with leftovers. But this is peasant food in the best sense: quick, resourceful, easy and cheap. You could easily feed a family with this tasty, inexpensive dish.

Tomato Sauce with Olives: Could this title be any more boring? It doesn't even do the dish justice. It should really be called Spicy Olive Basil Sauce, because that's what it is. A mixture of pitted and halved olives are sauteéd with olive oil and red pepper flakes, then simmered with the marinara and fresh basil. I didn't have any fresh basil so I used Trader Joe's Chopped Basil - fresh basil packed into a mini-ice cube tray and then frozen. You pop out the cubes directly into the sauce and they defrost into strands of fresh leaves. How handy is that? This simple, boringly titled recipe actually packed a lot of flavor, producing a spicy, chunky sauce (even the marinara seemed thicker two days after I made it), and even my sweetie, who doesn't like olives, was pleasantly surprised. With this recipe made, I realized I could now make...

Pizza al Spaghetti: More like "Crap al Spaghetti." Or, how about "Pain in the Ass al Spaghetti"? Whoa, whoa...where did that come from? Well, pardon the hostility, but this is really the first recipe that really, truly didn't work for me. I know, the title alone sounds pretty nasty, but I told myself that this project would make me try things I would otherwise avoid, and trying new things is good, right? Turns out, not so much.

You take leftover pasta (and the olive sauce provides a chunky, spicy base) and mix it with eggs and cheese. Then here's how you cook it: you pour half a cup of olive oil into a frying pan, pour in the pasta mixture and spread it out so it's a flat disc, cook it so it forms a crust on the bottom, then invert the mixture onto a plate and slip it back into the pan to cook the other side. Except there was way too much oil and when I flipped it over onto a plate (which fit the pan perfectly), hot oil came streaming out the sides. Um, what? First of all, this would be difficult enough as it is to execute smoothly, but I really didn't need hot oil splashing my arm.

Then I noticed the online version specifies only 1/4 of a cup of oil, which brings me to my question: why pay $30 for the book when the free online versions are revised, improved variations of the same recipes? I feel like a chump. Anyway, the result wasn't even like pizza, it was more like "pie al spaghetti," with a soft, tender filling between two barely-crusty edges. Cut into wedges, it was decent finger food, but I'm way too bitter about the experience to say anything nicer than that (not that there's anything nicer to say, anyway). This was the first big disappointment in the book (and yes, that counts even Polentagate 2006, which was more my fault than the book's). Sigh...

Torta di Pasta: This is a much better use for leftover pasta. It's basically the same as the Pizza al Spaghetti, except there's no flipping involved. You cook one side on the stove, then simply pop the whole pan as is into the broiler to cook the top. The eggy, cheesy filling puffs up and browns, and once cooled, it's cut into wedges to be served as a side dish or snack. With the parmesan cheese and 1.5 teaspoons of salt, this was a little too salty for me, and Lord knows I love me some salt, but otherwise I will definitely keep this in mind next time I have pasta-filled-tupperware lurking in my fridge.

Speaking of guts, I'm also trying numerous brands of whole wheat pasta to see if any of them don't taste like chewy cardboard. I'll let you in one the results once I've sampled enough varieties (I'm at 3 so far). But when you make five different pasta dishes in one week, altogether using about two pounds of pasta (I halved some of the recipes), you end up with one very angry colon. Oh well. No one said this would be easy. And now I have the burn marks to prove it.

And if you're wondering about the food photography I'm using, courtesy of the Food Network website, well, we'll get to that in another post.

OK, I had burn marks.

Ok, ok, they weren't really burn marks so much as some temporary pink stripes on my hand and arm.

But it still hurt.