This topic hasn't been broached in a while, so I figured I'd start a new specific thread, to hear about what you all are doing with pasta these days.
Significant Eater and I recently returned from a trip to Florence and Rome, and whenever we travel, I get inspired to cook like we ate "over there." So since traveling to Italy means pasta at practically every meal for me; not for the main course, but as a primi, and I'm making lots of pasta at home these days. Oh, I mean pasta sauces, which I use on high-quality dried pasta.
Our first night in Florence, I had what I consider the best sugo di carne I'd ever tasted...in that case, on pappardelle. And I'm trying to replicate it, getting close but not quite as good as that one.
It's an involved process, and I'm pretty much following a recipe from what I consider an iconic cookbook I own, Giuliano Bugialli's 1977 work, The Fine Art of Italian Cooking.
I saw some beautiful beef at the store yesterday, so I bought a hunk and stuck it in the freezer for a while, to make it easier to hand chop. The prep for this dish took like an hour...
The sauce contains said beef, olive oil, onions, carrots, celery, garlic, parsley, red wine, tomato paste, tomatoes, dried porcini and their soaking liquid, stock as necessary, s & p. After a few hours of almost covered simmering, it ends up like so...
I like to use it on penne or mezze rigatoni, (Setaro brand, in this case). It's better over the course of the next day or two, so we didn't have it last night, but it sure tastes good.
And you?
