After looking over the amazing potato-flake pickerel recipe, I want one again, but sadly, I don’t have the ingredients and I’ve had a few too many Caesars to drive, so I’m stuck with what I have in the house. And since I’m in a fishy mood, that will be another beer-battered haddock or two with fries, tartar sauce, and malt vinegar.
It’s been chilly here for the past few weeks (by California standards, anyway), so I wanted a hearty pasta dish. So I decided to try a new recipe: Rigatoni with Pork Ragù and Fresh Ricotta.
That looks delicious, and the key for me is the ricotta. It’s an absolutely amazing Italian cheese with a double taste profile – an initial taste, and a lingering smooth aftertaste. Aside from tasting it in its pure form, I’ve only had it with lasagna. I’m sure I’d love this rigatoni dish. My most frequent pasta dish is delicate spaghettini, but the thick pasta chunks of rigatoni seems like it would be great experience too! Damn, I just love all Italian food!
Yeah, that looks great!
I did a lasagna for the first time last night… we’ll be eating it for the rest of the week.
Cooking something for the first time, I will usually spend a little time reading multiple recipes and online discussions in order to understand ingredient ratios, temp/time options, styles/approaches, and just feel more grounded. For this I used my grandfather’s written recipe, Joy of Cooking, a few random online recipe blogs, and reddit. I learned there are two main questions when it comes to lasagna: no-boil pasta vs. regular, and ricotta vs. bechamel (vs. cottage cheese, which is a US variant).
I went with regular pasta (which was much less difficult than no-boil marketing would have one think) because the pasta is an important part of the dish and I wanted the thicker, chewier pasta sheets.
My grandfather’s recipe used ricotta. Joy of Cooking used bechamel. Folks online talked about the browning of the bechamel as being one of its selling points. So… I did both! Filled with ricotta, and topped with a bechamel.
I also made a ragu mostly following Joy of Cooking’s recipe. I was home and doing chores around the house, so getting started a little early to let a sauce render wasn’t too much trouble.
So, this lasagna had the following layers:
- 3x pasta
- 3x Beef-only ragu (ground beef, carrot, onion, celery, wine, tomato paste, milk, fennel, dried basil, pepper flakes, salt, and volumed up a bit with some jarred sauce).
- 2x Ricotta (ricotta, egg, parsley, and a negligible amount of grated parmesan cheese)
- 1x Grated cheese (mozzarella, provolone)
- 1x bechamel (butter, flour, milk, nutmeg, salt, simmered with an onion, carrot, and celery and then strained).
Definitely not a heart-healthy version of lasagna, but it came out heavenly. The herbs in the ragu and nutmeg in the bechamel really played well together. Nice thick toothsome pasta (De Cecco brand), with thin layers of sauces in between, including one melty cheese layer.
Tonight, a prepared General Tao (aka “General Tso”) chicken rice bowl, with fried rice. As a noodle fanatic I like it even better when they make it with thin rice noodles instead of rice, but they don’t do it often and rice is more traditional. Followed by some clementine oranges and an ice cream sandwich which I just noticed is, tragically, the last one in the box!
@Eonwe, that sounds marvellous! I haven’t made homemade lasagna for many years. It’s a lot of trouble but when done well it’s really amazing stuff. You’ve inspired me to do it again sometime.
I’ve never made it with bechamel but there’s a variant of store-made lasagna that’s made with bechamel that I buy occasionally and quite like it.
Pad Thai with tofu, and a Sweet Alice apple, my new favorite. I’ve only seen them at Trader Joe’s.
Dinner tonight will once again be chorizo sausages oven-baked in a baking dish coated with pizza sauce with a bed of chopped white onion and green pepper, once again with baked mac & cheese. I was on the fence about making this again because I’ve made it so often, but looking at the best-by date on the sausages, they had just been freshly made, so I couldn’t resist.
The difference this time is that there are sausage buns for the leftover sausages for the next few days, which ought to make great gourmet “hot dogs” with the fried onion and tomato sauce mixture wedged in and either Dijon or yellow mustard on top. To be had either with fries or tomato soup. Or if the weather is nice and I make it out to the nice supermarket that has a very fine soup stand, maybe a nice fresh soup like clam chowder or Forest Mushroom.
Homemade jalapeno pintos with brisket as the flavoring meat, and jalapeno cornbread. Beans are cooking right now and filling the house with their scent. Mmmmmmm.
This turned out to be so good that most of the sausages have already been consumed this way (with Dijon, not yellow mustard) and the baked mac & cheese remains unbaked. About 1000x better than an ordinary hot dog!
The only trick to remember is to remove the casing from the sausage. It’s fine if you’re eating it on a plate with a knife and fork, but stringy when you’re munching on it in a bun. Removing the skin does remove some of the flavour, but the onions, tomato sauce, and green pepper that have simmered in the juices bring plenty of flavour of their own. It’s the perfect condiment for the sausage bun! I should have done this long ago!
I’ll probably end up having the mac & cheese with the breakfast sausages that I made earlier and froze. Which is fine – when I have m&c, I just need a little accent of some kind of meat, or I can just have good baked m&c all by itself.
Last night I had a rehearsal in the evening and didn’t really have time to go home before hand (in the opposite direction), and so was going to have some kind of grocery store/convenience store food for dinner. But, I realized there was a basic Chinese food place near my destination and so got myself some Chinese take-out.
I have two truly “guilty” food pleasures (as in, I love them, they are awful for me, and if left to my own devices I would probably kill myself by eating them way too often): 1) hot dogs, and 2) decent pork fried rice and General Tso’s chicken or related variations.
I had a sesame chicken “combo” last night that was excellent! The rice was good, dry and not mushy, had that flavor I cannot get at home (wok hei?) that is such a treat. The chicken was all small pieces, which I prefer- many places have larger balls that have a lot of breading/filling that is quite unappetizing. This chicken had enough batter but no more, and the sauce had a nice heat to balance the sweetness.
The only miss were the boneless “ribs”… large pieces of mostly fat. I did not finish them, as they were pretty unappetizing.
I had a couple of ham, brie, and fig jam sliders, and an apple.