I was having a meal with friends a while ago at Pasta Pomodoro. My girlfriend ordered their Penne Portobello and told me it was one of her favorite dishes. I asked for a taste and decided that I could probably make this at home.
Continue reading Quick and Easy Pasta With Light Cream Sauce Recipe
When you’re drowning in a crimson tide of homegrown, heirloom tomatoes like this:
One of the myriad things you can do with them is make sauce. The good thing about sauce is, you can freeze it for later. We usually keep them in quart-sized freezer bags and pull them out as needed.
To make the sauce, we boiled down 15 lbs of heirloom tomatoes plus chunks of bell peppers, diced onions, sugar and salt until the sauce was reduced by half. I buzzed it with the hand blender until smooth. This was the most amazing tomato sauce ever – so sweet and savory at the same time!
Pasta has been one of my comfort foods going back to small kid time when we used to add bottled Ragu sauce to ground beef and ladle it on a big bowl of spaghetti, then top it with torn up Kraft American cheese slices. The ingredients have significantly improved in the House of Annie (as demonstrated by her recent Linguine alla carbonara). This time, she decided to kick things up a notch.
Instead of the regular bacon, Annie used pancetta. She also used shallots instead of onions. The cherry tomatoes were picked fresh from the garden, as was the basil chiffonade
How do you “kick up” your pasta?
Aloha, Nate
We were at California Pizza Kitchen with some friends one time. One of the dishes they ordered was Chicken Piccata. We’d never eaten it before (I usually don’t like capers) but Annie sneaked a bite and pronounced, “I can make this!”
So while out shopping she picked up a bottle of capers. A little later, she found a recipe off of Epiciurious and decided to try it. It’s a pretty easy recipe calling for chicken breasts pounded flat, lightly breaded then pan fried, laid over a mound of angel hair pasta and covered with a sauce containing butter, lemon juice, capers, and various seasonings. We threw in some mushrooms for fun.
It was very very good. We served it to our friend, who pronounced it better than CPK.
Aloha, Nate