Stage 1: Pasta Sauce
handful of fresh basil
4 vine tomatoes
2 roma tomatoes
1/4 large white onion(peeled, minced)
3 medium cloves of garlic(peeled, minced)
1 can tomato paste
1-2 cups of water
salt and pepper to taste
sauteed mushrooms(see stage 2)
Stage 2: Mushrooms
1 lb chanterelles
1 large portobello cap
1 few drops truffle oil
extra virgin olive oil
Stage 3: Other stuff
1 large section of Kale(reduces down to a small portion)
1 ball of bufala mozzarella
2 packets fresh spinach pasta(in this case, linguini)
Stage 1:
The most important part of a chef's work? The love of cooking. Ha, no, actually it is the knife.
In this case, Henckels. Always sharpen your knives after a few uses, and store them separate from all other cutlery.
Take your knife and attack your tomatoes.
Your Vine tomatoes, above, and below your Romas.
In the picture with the Romas, you can see that I've already chopped my garlic(in reality, I had garlic left over chopped from last week's chili), so I am skipping that step for you. Chop the garlic, chop the roma tomatoes, and then Quarter the vine tomatoes. Don't go to slowly and don't press down - you want to reserve the tomato liquid as much as possible. Place the quartered vine tomatoes and the chopped/minced romas with the garlic, and chop your basil as well. Your first stage prep should look like this:
Throw all of this into a pot
and add some tomato paste and water.
more paste = thicker sauce. Add the paste in tablespoon amounts and adjust with water to get the consistency you want. It will get thicker as the tomatoes break apart, so don't worry if it seems a bit thin.
Stage 2: Mushroooooooooooms
As the sauce is cooking(turn the stovetop onto hi to bring to a boil, then bring it down to a simmer then cover the pot),
you will wash, remove the stem from, and then chop up your portobello cap
and then treat your chanterelles in the same fashion. Keep the chanterelle stems - they are meaty texture for your sauce.
Throw on some awesome music while you are at it, dammit.
And your mushrooms should look like this:
I did this all beforehand(in the pictures you can see the tomatoes still not in the sauce) but you don't have to. I just find it easier to get everything ready before I begin to cook.
Throw a pan onto the stove, head the pan FIRST then add the olive oil and a few drops of the white truffle oil. Then throw in the mushrooms and sautee the hell out of them. You want the smell of the truffle oil to lessen, as it gets pulled into the mushrooms and the mushroom liquid comes out. It looks like this:
right before it is done, at which point you throw the mushrooms(with about half of the liquid in the pan) into the sauce, at which point the sauce looks like this:
at this point, I removed the large quarters of vine tomato, put them in a bowl, and mashed the hell out of them with a knife and fork. I then threw the whole contents into the sauce again. Turn the heat up to about a 4-5 and leave uncovered. You want the sauce to start reducing. Throw in your chopped up 1/4 onion if you have it, and let sit.
Stage 3: everything else
at this point, you want to add a bit of oil to your mushroom pan and let it smoke a bit. Get your Kale and wash it and place it on your cutting board. It looks crazy. Like this.
Well, that is not crazy enough. Let's make it crazier. Chop it up into large chunks! Don't worry about it seeming a little too big. It reduces down a hell of a lot.
place the kale in your mushroom pan and cover with a lid of some sort to trap the moisture. As each batch gets smaller, add more and more kale until all of your kale is in the pan. Let the Kale wilt and absorb some of the flavor from the mushrooms - Kale is a wonderfully textural vegetable, and is basically a blank slate as far as flavor goes. It is not as difficult as some Spinach, and our pasta is spinachy anyways, which is a good complement. The kale, fully wilted, looks like so.
Throw on a song, and wait for your sauce to reduce. The song should be something like this,
and the sauce should look a little bit like this,
at which point it is pretty much done. You should take a large pot, add water with a handful of sea salt, and let it come to a rolling boil. Once it is at a rolling boil, add some pasta,
and cook until at the texture you want. remove the pasta and place in a container with a little bit of the starchy pasta water. Let the sauce continue to boil, and take your mozzarella,
and slice it into thin slices, maybe about 1/4" thick. set aside with the mozzarella water.
Yeah, then throw some pasta in a bowl, add the kale, pasta sauce, and some mozzarella. It should look like this:
and it will be DELICIOUS.
Till next weekend! I think I might cook something difficult, like short ribs with wheatberries and capers. Or I might get drunk at a party, so either way, someone is happy. And vomiting.
-Rich
the subtlety is reduced by two
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