Baked Lemon Pasta. There is this website that I ran across when I was trolling around for recipes one day, and you’ll have to forgive me if I gush all over the place while telling you about it.
It is called The Pioneer Woman, and today’s recipe comes straight from this site. The site belongs to Ree Drummond. She lives on a ranch in Oklahoma with her husband and her four kids, and how she does everything she does all day long — well, it makes me exhausted just to READ about it. In addition to everything involved with running a ranch that looks like it has an endless number of horses, dogs, cows and visitors, she also homeschools her four kids, cooks an endless array of incredible-looking dishes, and is one amazing photographer.
And…wait for it…this fall she has what will surely be a spectacular book coming out from William Morrow Cookbooks (which yes, is a division of HarperCollins!). The Pioneer Woman. Penne with Gorgonzola Tomato Sauce. This blog started out with me trying and then posting new recipes that I had tried out and loved, and a lot of what I put up here is still exactly that.
But a few months into it, it occurred to me that I should also be sharing some of the tried and true beloved recipes that I have made again and again over the years. And so I started a category called “Kate’s Favorites.” (you can find it on the right hand side of the blog web page, under the heading “What’s Cooking At Framed.” These are all the recipes up on the blog that are my true blue, time-tested, best friends of recipes. Brown Butter Pasta with Egg. If I had to make a top ten list of foods that I love, it would probably go something like this: 1.
Bacon 2. Pasta 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. So a recipe called Brown Butter Pasta with Egg? And in this case, not only are you going to use the browned butter on your pasta. It’s going to be SO wonderful, you won’t even miss the bacon and the chocolate. Brown Butter Pasta with Egg Ingredients Kosher salt, to taste 8 oz. fresh pasta, such as fettuccine or tagliatelle. Homemade Gnudi from The Spotted Pig. I'm pretty sure the word "gnudi" wasn't on anyone's radar until they were served at The Spotted Pig in New York, which was when they became a food dork household name.
In Italian, "gnudi" means what it sounds like in English: naked. It refers to little pasta-like dumplings that are "naked" of their pasta wrapper, raviolis without anything to enclose them. Gnudi are a bit like gnocchi, but they have far less flour and so are pillowy in the way that gnocchi never are. The Spotted Pig has gotten more press than it will ever need, and I don't feel the need to sing its praises too lengthily here. It's an outstanding New York restaurant serving food that has drawn crowds and accolades consistenty since it opened six years ago. The way the Spotted Pig serves them is typical of its cooking style: absurdly rich, in a bath of brown butter, with little regard for balance. Over on Serious Eats' Burger Lab column, Kenji recently reverse-engineered a Spotted Pig burger that looks pretty darn good.
Velvet Pasta, aka Pasta al Pomodoro. Oh, I have so many many things to say about this innocent looking plate of pasta with tomato sauce, so hunker down with me for a little while.
First of all, I got it from the latest edition of the magazine Bon Appetit. Now, I am a long-time friend of Bon Appetit. I was with them back in the good old days, when they published more fabulous recipes than I could keep up with. Then…as sometimes happens with long-term relationships, things got rocky. (Note to Southern husband: I’m not talking about you, honey. Well, okay! The basics of this one are: you need to really salt the water before you add the pasta. Baked Ravioli with Goat Cheese and Pistou. I made this particular recipe because I found these adorable baby ravioli at the supermarket and they were just PERFECT for this dish, which is basically little individual ravioli and goat cheese casseroles.
You could absolutely use the big ravioli, but the little ones mean you can get more raviolis in there, and I am all about as much ravioli as possible in life. I also learned what the word “pistou” means: it is a sauce made of basil leaves, oil oil and garlic. I bet you thought that was pesto, but no — pesto means there are ground up nuts in the sauce as well. Pistou has no nuts in it. See that? So the first thing you do is make that pistou, which entails whirling fresh basil in your food processor with garlic and just enough olive oil to make a thick sauce.
Baked Ravioli with Goat Cheese and Pistou Ingredients 1 large bunch fresh basil (save a few leaves for garnish) 4 cloves garlic 1/4 cup olive oil 8 ounce package fresh ravioli 4 ounces goat cheese 3/4 cup cream Pine nuts for garnish 1. Pasta with Garlic, Blue Cheese and Tomatoes. A few days ago I posted a recipe that included some reminiscing about our recent Vermont vacation, and while you may have thought you were done looking at my vacation pictures…guess what.
I held back a few, because I wanted to have enough time to go over a couple of little treasures that I found while we were up there. I promise that this will be at least marginally related to that plate of pasta up there. One of things we love to do is go exploring around the rambling unpaved roads, because you never know what you are going to find around the next turn. We found a couple of fabulous spots in Castleton, Vermont.The first was Wright Choice Alpacas.