Your pasta experience(s)

Cafe Society
21

We had similar food upbringings. Except our “Roman Holiday” was called “American Chop Suey” and was served with enough regularity that it wasn’t at all exotic. I had pizza at a friend’s house for the first time–probably early teens–and I found it pretty exotic. I never had a bagel until I met my (now) husband’s family and was introduced to the wonders of Jewish soul food.

I am proud to have overcome my white bread/Miracle Whip/bologna sandwich background, and learned to enjoy and cook all sorts of food. Except . . .

. . . I suck at traditional mac and cheese. I totally get how to do it (roux, white sauce, cheese, cooked pasta, combine, bake until crusty) but mine is always too dry or grainy or bland.

Friends beg for my Fettuccini Alfredo, but I seem to be able to manage cream, butter and parmesan way better than simple mac & cheese.

I used to like Spaghetti Os with the little hot dog slices. Mmmmm . . . . Italian goodness!

22

Graininess may be caused the the type of cheese you’re using. If you mix in a good melting cheese like Gruyere (or even good ol’ American), it will likely reduce that grainy texture, much like it does for a fondue. The recipe I have calls for equal amounts of cheddar and American, but that’s a very non-exotic, basic old-timey American recipe.

Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
3 tablespoons butter
12 ounces extra-sharp cheddar cheese, coarsely grated
12 ounces American cheese, coarsely grated
1 pound elbow pasta, boiled in salted water until just tender, drained, and rinsed under cold water
1/8 teaspoon cayenne (optional)
Salt
2/3 cup whole milk.

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Use one tablespoon butter to thickly grease a 9-by-13-inch baking dish or a casserole dish. Combine grated cheeses and set aside two heaping cups for topping.
  2. In a large bowl, toss together the pasta, cheeses, cayenne (if using) and salt to taste. Place in prepared pan and evenly pour milk over surface. Sprinkle reserved cheese on top, dot with remaining butter and bake, uncovered, 45 minutes. Raise heat to 400 degrees and bake 15 to 20 minutes more, until crusty on top and bottom.
23

Pasta al Forno is my favorite pasta dish. You use small penne rigate, tomato sauce, little mini meatballs, lots of mozarella and parmesan and then bake it in the oven. Delicous!

24

Growing up in Bethesda MD in the 60’s there wasn’t a lot of Italian food or pizza available. In the Philadelphia burbs in the 70’s there was some more Italian influence on the food, but for me that was mostly pizza (and cheesesteaks, but those don’t fit neatly into this category). The pizza was fabulous quality. Some say it was due to the mob influence on the distribution of mozzerella cheese and other pizza ingredients. I only began to get exposure to genuine home cooked Italian food soon before I left for NY. Once in NY, fabulous Italian food was everywhere. There was fresh pasta, vodka sauces, bracciole, gnocci, and the wide variety of Italian styles. A restaurant without any adjective in the name defaulted to Italian restaurant, and then some 1st and 2nd generation Italians moved into the neighborhood, and my exposure to Italian American home cooking grew tremendously. Just writing this is making me hungry. I can’t pick a single favorite dish, but if it’s got pasta in it, I love it.

25

I eat and cook all kinds of pasta, but my current fave is pasta puttanesca, with anchovies, capers and olives, with a little red pepper flakes for kick. Really good stuff.

My wife used to make really good vegetarian lasagna with eggplant, spinach and zucchini, and lots of mozzarella.

26

Tonight for dinner I made: tomato sauce over farfalle with melted mozzarella.

27

I grew up on a farm on northwest Ohio and graduated from high school in 1970. We sometimes had spaghetti. I knew vaguely about macaroni and cheese, but I don’t remember if I ever had any of it. We sometimes had pizza from a pizza kit. I don’t think we ever had pizza at a restaurant or from take-out, since we couldn’t afford to eat out much. In any case, pizza chains were only starting to arrive in our area. We weren’t poor, but we were struggling working-class. No, we didn’t say “Eye-talian.” We weren’t stupid. Even people like us who were just scraping by watched TV, so we know things like that. When I got to college I was astonished to discover that I actually liked pizza and that the problem was the pizza from a kit that we ate at home wasn’t a good example of pizza.

28

shoot… I thought you were going to talk about something else. I was all about to bring up Crystal Cove and WHO WAS PHONE?! :smiley:

29

i can’t understand why people like sun-dried tomatoes so much. produces a thin, oily sauce that reminds me of prunes. i like tomato and i like to use a big can of stewed tomatoes (chunks or pureed.) mix it with lots of garlic, basil and capers. i make the spaghetti swim in all of that and dump in powdered parmesan.

30

Actually I hate sin dried tomatoes …

My first pizza experience was in perhaps 1969, the Shakey’s Pizza on West Henrietta Rd in Rochester [actually technically Henrietta. I don’t do the city ward crap, it is all Rochester to me] so that tends to be what I think of as pizza. I do remember being taken to a japanese restaurant at the age of 9 for lunch and I had tonkatsu with buckwheat udon. Interesting for someone used to wheat pastas. Asti’s in Greenwich Village used to have a pizza show, with the chef doing a ‘lecture’ on making pizza that usually ended up with the dough disc spinning all over the place, and dough being flung. Pity it is closed now, I miss the singing waiters. I got birthday postcards from them for years.

31

I think I speak for all when I say that I’d love a recipe for those.

32

LOL I just need to type better, though I do vaguely remember out of a piece of fiction cant remember the title] a description of making the host for a black mass by cooking the flour and holy water on the body of a harlot. How well you can cook using body heat I have my doubts, but maybe lay the tomato slices on a sunbathing harlot?

33

Yum?

34

Maybe once a month, when Mom didn’t feel like cooking, she’d break out a box of Chef Boyardee. The only other time pasta was used was for macaroni salads. At church smorgasbords we had American Chop Suey and similar dishes. Mom started to buy Spagetti-O’s when I was 12ish, and I liked eating them straight from the can.

That was about it.

I made lasagna when I was 15 - the first time my parents ever had it. Dad wasn’t a fan - he was a meat / starch / veggie separate kind of guy. He hated pizza, too.

Now, I often make fettucini, baked ziti, lasagna, or spaghetti. I do cheat on the ziti and use bottled sauce.

35

Jamie Oliver, who I find desperately annoying to watch, nonetheless has a recipe which manages to combine 2 of my childhood favourites- macaroni cheese and cauliflower cheese in his 30 Minute Meals book.

It is very, very yummy.

My version (more garlic, looser quantities).

Ingredients:
Bacon/pancetta
A head of cauliflower
250-500g of macaroni
2 slices of toast or stale bread (to make into breadcrumbs)
4 peeled cloves of garlic
A 250ml tub of creme fraiche
2 sprigs of rosemary.
cheese- a mixture of parmesan and cheddar or another white, semi-hard cheese, grated, enough to fill a coffee cup (or more, if you are greedy).
salt, pepper, oil

Boil a quartered head of cauliflower with your pasta in a big pot of salted water until both are tender. I like garlic, so I also add 2 peeled cloves of garlic to the pot.
Meanwhile, put 8-10 slices of bacon/pancetta in a large casserole dish in a hot oven for 10min until cooked and crispy.

Blitz half the bacon with the rosemary, another couple of cloves of garlic, seasoing, a little bit of grated parmesan, the bread and some oil to make a nice, aromatic breadcrumb mixture.

Drain the pasta, cauliflower and garlic, reserving a bit of the liquid.
Mash the cooked garlic and cut up the bacon into small pieces.
Break up the cauliflower a bit.
Add the rest of the cheese, the bacon and the creme fraiche to the pasta, garlic and cauliflower.
Season.
Stir until well mixed, add a little cooking liquid or butter if you think it needs it to stay nice and loose.
Spoon back into the casserole dish you used earlier.
Top with the breadcrumb mixture.
Put in the hot oven for 5-10minutes until the top is crunchy and golden, the cheese is melted and the mixture is bubbling.

Serve.
Comfort in a bowl- garlic, pasta, cauliflower, cheese, bacon- totally delicious as a treat.
Not for those counting calories.

36

I didn’t learn this until a couple of years ago. Until then I was under the impression that pasta is pasta no matter where you bought it. Until I picked up some real pasta (spaghetti) at an Italian specialty food store. All this time I was eating sub-par pasta.

37

I love good pasta, and I eat it fairly often when I’m making dinner for myself. I’ve had some bad experiences with it too.

The student restaurants here provide pretty solid food for the cost. The normal price for a meal is about 7e, and 2,5e for students. The government additionally pays the restaurant 1,77e for each student meal served, so the restaurant gets 4,27e for each student diner. The food is self-served from large containers, and is nothing special most of the time. Overall I’m very happy with the food considering the low cost. It’s usually tasty, fast to eat on a lunch break, a short distance away, and sometimes quite delicious.

The rice in these two restaurants is ok, and so are the potatoes. Somehow they manage to screw up the pasta every time it’s being served. Now I’m not too picky with food in general, but I refuse to eat that pasta. It’s cooked totally white, soggy, and sticking together. The problem becomes worse as the pasta continues to cook in the hot metal container. I don’t understand why they need to overcook the pasta in the first place, and then let it cook even further as it stands.

38

My mom would make pasta of various sorts fairly regularly. Spaghetti was most common, but there was also rigatoni, rotini, zitti, occasionally ravioli, and sometimes lasagna (though mostly just for when we had company over). The noodles were dried (except for ravioli; that was frozen), and my sister and I weren’t too fond of her homemade sauce, so that was usually from a can or jar.

Then there was my grandmother on Dad’s side, who was from the suburbs of Rome. She made an excellent spaghetti with meatballs, I think mostly from scratch (though the recipes are probably lost forever, now). The pasta she used was whatever it is that’s one step wider than fettuccine, and her meatballs were like personal-sized meatloafs. We loved it so much that it’s almost always what she made when we came over, though everything else she made was excellent, too.

And my grandmother on Mom’s side was German and married to an Irishman, but was never one to turn up her nose at good food, just because it came from a different culture. She didn’t do pasta all that often, but she made an absolutely amazing deep-dish cavatini. That, thankfully, I do have the recipe for, and really ought to try making one of these times.