Budín de Elote

Anyone who has visited the Sunday brunch buffet at my favorite restaurant in the world, Fonda San Miguel, will immediately recognize this dish and the intense cravings it produces. It is amazing that of all the delicious, intricate, authentic dishes prepared labouriously with hand-prepared ingredients and traditional recipies, this simple dish of corn, flour, and butter is the thing that stands out at the end of the meal.

Although the name means “corn pudding”, when done properly this dish will come out like a soufflé, light and fluffy, a cross between sweet and salty, and melting in your mouth while filling your appetite at the same time.

One note for preparation of the ingredients – you may have a tough time finding poblano chile peppers outside of the Tex-Mex region. Luckily, this is more of a garnish than a core component of the dish, and hence can be substituted by other comparable types of peppers, for example a green bell pepper. Or if you happen to be in London, go down to Whole Foods and grab some spanish Pimiento de Padrón. A bit spicier than poblano, and quite a unique taste, I found that it adds a nice Spanish flair to this Mexican classic.

To get started, we will prepare our ingredients. I started from the recipe I found in the official Fonda San Miguel cook book.

2 pounds frozen corn kernels, thawed (about 900g)
1 cup whole milk
6 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
6 tablespoons butter, softened
3/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup (4 ounces) shredded cheese – Monterey Jack or Cheddar
1 poblano chile pepper
1/2 red bell pepper

There is a bit of prep work to do. First, preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (177 degrees C). Lightly grease a baking pan, approx 13-by-9 inch.

The first thing we need to take care of is our peppers. As I mentioned above, I am using pimientos de Padrón, because I couldn’t find a good source for poblanos.

Ideally we want to pre-roast our peppers – especially the green ones. Since I’m using Padróns, I covered them in olive oil and a good amount of sea salt, to reproduce the typical effect you get with a plate of Padróns in a tapas restaurant. Then I stuck them on a tray in the oven as it was warming up. Keep an eye on this as you don’t want to burn them! But I think I left them in a good 10 minutes or so. The downside of these peppers is you can’t really peel them, so they aren’t quite ideal – after baking with the budín they are going to be a bit too hard for what we want, and not easy to cut through with a spoon. But still, they do the job.

As for the red pepper, I’m also using a different variation here – one of those sweeter long red peppers, instead of the normal red bell pepper. Fortunately, this one can be peeled, although I don’t think I bothered to do it this time. If you want to do this properly, put them in some boiling water for about 10 minutes, then get them out and cool them down and then you should be able to peel them with ease.

Both sets of peppers need to be chopped into slices, which we are going to use as a kind of garnish on top of our budín before it goes in the oven.

Now for the fun part. We need a lot of corn here – I found a nice 1kg bag from Waitrose, and just kept about a 10th in the bag. The rest needs to be thawed out to room temperature to be soft enough to purée.

I don’t have a nice food processor, but I do have a decent blender, which can do the same job, with a bit more work. So we start with a bit of corn, maybe a cup or two, and about half of the milk. Preparing this for the first time, I started to think this was going to be an impossible feat. But have faith – it will purée if you keep at it. My initial technique was to use the ice-pulse mode. Then I got into the slowest continuously rotating speed, while using a butter knife to push corn kernels down along the sides, but very carefully as to not obstruct the blade.

After much persistence you can start to actually see a pulp forming. Once you’ve gotten this far you can go ahead and start adding more corn. The recipe states to use only the minimum amount of milk to get the mixture to purée. I think in this attempt I used even more than the full cup of milk, and I don’t think had any very bad effect on the outcome. But with the right technique, it should be possible to finish the purée with very little milk.

Once we have all the corn in, and have produced a reasonably mushy purée, with no big kernels remaining, we can add the egg yolks. The recipe states to add them one at a time, with about 30 seconds of mixing between them. And then we also add the sugar. After this is all mixed up we can transfer the corn-sugar-yolks mix to a bowl.

In a separate bowl we can prepare the flower, salt, and baking powder mixture, and then mix this into the corn purée.

And in one more bowl we have to prepare the egg whites. Having never done this before, I had no idea how much work it takes. The recipe states that we should beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. This basically means to beat the egg whites for ages, until they turn from clear cloudy liquidy form into a thick white airy foam. I’m sure there is a better way to do this, but done by hand it seems to take 20-30 minutes of hard work.

So once the egg whites are ready, we can fold this foam into our corn mixture, along with the shredded cheese. The recipe calls for “Chihuahua” cheese, whatever that is, or alternatively, Monterrey Jack, or alternatively to that, Cheddar. Luckily I found some decent Monterrey Jack at Waitrose.

We want this to really be the last step before our budín goes in the oven, so it will stay light and fluffy and turn into a proper soufflé. So as soon as the egg whites are ready and folded in, get that mixture into the baking pan and lay the peppers on top.

Stick the tray in the oven and keep an eye on it. The recipe says to cook for 45 minutes. I think it could have gone a bit longer still. But I think it’s done when it’s just starting to turn golden brown around the edges.

You can try to serve with a knife and spatula, but it’s not exactly solid. When it’s fresh out of the oven it’s particularly soft so you may want to let it set a bit. Honestly this dish is about as good cold as it is hot. Generally I think the one at Fonda is served quite warm, and they just give you a big spoon to serve yourself from the buffet tray, so I don’t think it’s really meant to be cleanly “sliced”. But of course we can make an attempt for our presentation…

The original set of high-res photos is here.

Pasta Bolognese

Ingredients:

400g ground (minced) beef
500g fresh tomatoes
1 spicy chili pepper, chopped
4-5 cloves of garlic
2-3 slices of onion, chopped
500g tomato passata sauce
1 cup water
some salt for the meat and sauce
some italian spices, basil, oregano, etc.
some extra virgin olive oil

500g penne pasta
some salt for cooking the pasta, preferably sea salt

This is a home-grown recipe based on some family tradition and just common sense. Pasta Bolognese is a pasta dish with a type of ragù sauce that comes from Bologna. Many recipes for bolognese call for other ingredients such as carrots, celery, mushrooms, etc. – but I tend to keep it simple unless I happen to have those things on hand anyway. The key here is the fresh tomatoes, which add such a rich fruity flavor to the sauce that you really don’t need all of that extra fluff. But by all means feel free to experiment – every family does it a different way, and there is no one set fast rule for a bolognese sauce. One thing I have noticed is that every time I try to add celery the sauce comes out with a flavor that is almost too sweet, or just doesn’t taste right – so I would advise to use extra ingredients in moderation.

Also note that many recipies call for both ground beef and ground pork – in Italy this is done traditionally because both meats are available in the kitchen, and you can dilute the beef with pork to keep costs down. But I don’t really think there is any reason you have to have pork in the sauce, and certainly you will want the beef as it will give you a richer meatiness. So again unless you happen to have the pork on hand, don’t worry if you just stick with beef.

So let’s get started. The first ingredients we want to prepare will be our chopped onion, chopped chili pepper, and cloves of garlic. I like to slice the garlic pieces in half length-wise.

Now, I’m going to take about half of the chili pepper and half of the chopped onion, along with some salt, and put that straight into a pan with the beef.

You can put a little bit of oil but it’s not really necessary as the beef is going to render some fat pretty quickly anyways. I’m a health nut so I generally stick to the lowest-fat beef I can find, usually like 8% or 10%. But this is still going to render plenty of fat, so keep an eye on it and drain the fat out once the pan starts filling up with it.

Now we are going to let this sizzle on medium-high heat until it gets nicely browned but not burnt. As soon as it’s browned, we can take this all off the heat and put it to the side, or empty in a bowl if you want to reuse that pan.

Generally I like to multi-task here, so while I’ve got the meat started, I go ahead and start working on the sauce. So for this we start with the freshest nicest tomatoes we can find. I prefer to buy tomatoes on the vine if possible, or even better grown them yourself and pick them out of your garden when you’re ready to start cooking.

I like to chop these tomatoes up into basically byte-size pieces – that is just going to aid in ensuring the sauce starts off right cooking very evenly.

Now I go ahead and put the rest of my onion and chili pepper, along with the garlic, into another pan with some extra virgin olive oil and start that off on medium-low heat – really we are just trying to flavor up the oil and soften the onions a bit.

After a minute or two the oil is infused with those flavors and everything is nice and hot, so we can go ahead and scoop in our fresh chopped tomatoes.

Now we let that sauce cook well over medium heat for about 10-20 minutes or however long it takes to break down the tomatoes and make a nice base for the sauce. I usually cover the pan for a while to let some of the flavors dig deep into the sauce. Some of the skins will remain and make a nice texture, but otherwise we want this sauce nicely broken down and runny.

At this point we can go ahead and add the tomato passata, along with the extra basil and oregano, some salt, and maybe another teaspoon of olive oil drizzled into the mix. I mix this together and cover it again to let it cook for 5-10 minutes.

When we take the cover back off we should find that the sauce is starting to bubble a bit, and so we want to add our cup of water to the mix. We mix this in and by now we have doubled the size of our original base of fresh ingredients. So we want to cook this uncovered for a good while and let the sauce really reduce so the flavors have a chance to pack in as the sauce thickens. This can be another 10-20 minutes, or much longer – basically the longer we cook the more flavor we get. We need to remember to stir frequently throughout this entire process, to make sure the sauce doesn’t stick to the bottom and cooks evenly. We can also be testing the sauce throughout the process for flavor, adding more salt and/or spices as needed – this is really an art, not a science. Every tomato is different, and so the amount of salt and spice you need to balance it out is not an exact measurement. This is also the phase where you might add some red wine to reduce into the sauce, according to some recipes. Again feel free to experiment!

Finally our sauce is reduced and ready so we can add the beef and stir it in. This will be the final stage of cooking the sauce, as we just need to let it simmer on low heat with the beef for maybe 10-12 minutes.

While that’s finishing up nicely, we go ahead and cook the pasta. Remember to keep it al-dente and not overcooked – this is very important!

Penne or perhaps rigatoni is the best compliment to a ragù sauce, because the sauce will stick to it inside and out and if we’ve done a good job of finely mincing up our meat, the meat bits will hide nicely inside the tubes of pasta and produce flavor-packed sensation in every bite.

Once we’ve cooled the pasta down under some running water, we’re ready to mix everything together. I like to put the pasta back into my big pasta pan without the water, and then pour the sauce over the top and stir it in.

Finally, serve while it’s hot, with some freshly grated parmesean cheese on top.

The full set of high-quality photos for this recipe are here.

Buon appetito!

What I got for Christmas: Tamales!

I guess I’m a strange sort of traveler. I’ve never been much for doing the typical touristy things. When I go to visit a new place for the first time, rather than going to see the famous landmarks and “must-see” destinations, I spend most of my time trying to get a feel for the local culture of the people that actually live there. I remember shocking some of my colleagues when, after 2 years in London, I explained that I had just seen Tower Bridge for the first time. I had spent most of my time searching for the best espresso, the best pizza, the best whisky, etc. I guess I’ve always just had a more practical approach to getting to know a place.

So it’s no surprise that whenever I come back from a trip, my bag is packed with a different kind of souveneirs. Typically this means local food and/or drinks that you just can’t get back in London – or in some cases that you could get but at an obscene markup. Case in point: the Aunt Jemima Pancake Syrup I mentioned back in my post about French Toast costs about 3 times as much as the same thing I could buy back in the States.

Like most people I guess, Christmas is one of my favorite times of year. But for me, besides getting to go back home and see my family, and besides the presents, there is another very special reason. Every time I go back home to Texas, I bring back a bag loaded with goodies that you can really only get in the Lone Star State. And even if I don’t have room for anything else, the number one thing on my list is: TAMALES!

I took this wonderful food for granted growing up in Texas, because it was easy to have several times a week and not even think about it. But as soon as you move out of Texas, you find that this one thing, above all else (well, of course excepting Rudy’s barbeque) is something you just can’t find anywhere else. I mean, of course I guess if you go to Mexico you’ll find tamales, and even in a few other states nearby, such as Nevada and Arizona – but even there it’s just not the same.

I remember trying to explain Tamales to my colleagues when I lived in Italy. It was a very humorous episode, because just the name “Los Tamales” is almost a play on words in Italy – it sounds a lot like “Lo Sta’Males”, which could mean something like “The food that makes you feel bad afterwards”, but in a good way, like when you have just had too much of a good thing. So of course everyone in Italy was looking forward to my return after Christmas that year with a bag full of sta’males to try…

According to some sources, tamales are even part of “one of the oldest Mexican culinary traditions…at Christmas”…”many Texans think Tamales are as much a sign of the holidays as turkey and cranberries.” Well I’ll admit I didn’t know that, but hey it fits right in with my theme so I’ll take it!

Last year I even broke down and bought myself a high quality pressure cooker pot, and brought over a big supply of corn husks and masa de harina, to make them myself. They came out well, but this turned out to be one of the most involved and laborious cooking processes I have had to work through. But it was worth it, so I’m sure I’ll be revisiting that recipe later this year when I’ve run out of the supply I brought back with me.

So this year I brought back a few packs of pork tamales. They also come in chicken, beef, and even cheese and vegetable. But pork is really the best, and this year I just didn’t want to fool around.

Tamales are great because often they are already sold frozen, and can just be kept frozen for a long time until you’re ready to defrost and eat. I bring a cooling bag back with me to keep them cold all the way home. They are cooked and kept individually wrapped in corn husks. The best way to warm them up to eat is to keep them in the husk, and stick them in the oven or microwave to defrost, and then heat up in the microwave for a minute or so. When heating in the microwave I think it’s generally good to wrap these up well in some wet paper towels – that keeps them moist and heats them up more evenly. Then discard the paper towels and the corn husks, and serve the tamale, perhaps with some mexican rice and some refried beans.

Tamales are delicious naked without any topping, or you can top them with any number of salsas. I find green tomatillo salsa to be a nice and more authentically Mexican way to eat them. Alternatively, you could eat them with the typical Tex-Mex style chili-con-carne enchilada sauce and some cheese. Or you could use red salsa, sour cream, pico de gallo, or guacamole – really whatever works for you I guess.

In Texas you can often find tamales served as part of a combo meal, along with enchiladas and/or tacos. But the best tamales come from dedicated tamale houses such as this one or this one. Mmm my defrosted tamales are pretty good, but I’m already looking forward to next year’s Christmas!

The full set of high-quality photos for this recipe are here.

Buen Provecho!

Farfalle al Salmone

The truth is, I’m not a huge fan of Salmon. In fact a lot of people I know feel the same way. I’ve never really liked the taste of cooked salmon served as a filet in a fish restaurant. Raw salmon served as sushi is just boring, and I tend to smother it in wasabi to get rid of the salmon-ness of it. I’m much more of a tuna person when it comes to sushi. Smoked salmon with cream cheese on a bagel is bearable, but again this is more due to the cream cheese I think, or at best it must be the balancing of flavors that helps even out that strong salmon flavor. But salmon on its own generally has a taste I’ve never liked.

I guess that’s why, the first time I mention this dish to people, I get a reaction that is probably similar to my own the first time I hard about it – something like “are you sure you really want to cook tonight, wouldn’t you rather just go out?”

But I’ve made this dish countless times now, and not only is it delicious and gorgeous, but it also comes out perfect every time. I’ve never managed to make this dish and have it come out tasting less than great. And more importantly, even with all of the sceptics that have come and gone at my dining table, I’ve never had anyone leave with anything less than a “wow, that actually was really good!” So if you’ve got a salmon sceptic to convert, try this recipe.

The only problem with this dish is, in my opinion, that the resulting taste is directly porportional to the freshness and quality of salmon used – and of course, having the freshest, top quality smoked salmon almost has no upper limit on how expensive it can get. So you have to just find something within your budget and stick with it. Even with the budget smoked salmon from Tesco, the dish tastes great – which means you can put this whole thing together for under 10 pounds (to serve 4 people).

So let’s start with the ingredients:

200-300g smoked salmon
250g cherry tomatoes
4 garlic cloves
1 red chilli peper
A few tablespoons of olive oil
50-100g double cream
Fresh parsley
Some salt to cook the pasta
500g farfalle pasta

As with my other recipes, we start by chopping up and preparing the ingredients.

First, we chop up the chilli pepper and slice the garlic cloves into thinner pieces.

For this recipe let’s assume the salmon comes in those prepared packs of thin slices.

We chop up the salmon into small squares.

Put a small amount of the salmon squares to the side – this is going to be kept raw and used as a garnish at the end.

The tomatoes we want for this recipe are those small cherry tomatoes, or something similar. This is going to add a lot of flavor to this dish, so get something with some nice sweet, fresh flavors.

We chop the tomatoes into 4 pieces lengthwise.

After chopping we want to press most of the juice out of these tomatoes with our hands, and then we end up with just the good bits.

Heat up a few tablespoons of olive oil on a flat pan. We want this to get up to medium heat.

Throw in the red pepper and let that cook for a few seconds in the hot oil.

Then add the garlic and let that flavor the oil a bit. Don’t burn anything here.

After just a few more seconds go ahead and put in the salmon. Remember we need to keep that small portion uncooked, to the side for later.

It only takes a minute or so to cook the salmon.

Once the salmon is decently cooked, we can add the chopped tomatoes. Add some olive oil as well if the salmon isn’t fully covered – we need this to turn into a sauce now.

Now turn down the heat to low and cover the pan – this needs to simmer for a while.

After 10 minutes or so the tomatoes should be cooked and this should have developed into a nice sauce.

At this point we can add a bit of cream. Be careful not to add too much – we don’t want to ruin the sauce with too much cream. Better less than more, we can always keep adding if we want.

After that’s simmered for another minute or so and the sauce is fully mixed together, it’s done – we don’t need to cook the sauce with the cream for long. Now we can just turn the heat off, cover the pan, and let it sit for a while to thicken.

While the sauce is thickening we can cook the pasta.

With farfalle, we really want to be careful not to overcook, so keep an eye on this pasta and get it out the second it feels cooked enough. We really want to keep it al dente. While normally I would cool pasta off and then put the sauce on it, in this case I would probably try to keep the pasta warm and pour the sauce over, because the sauce has been cooling a bit by this point. But in order to do it that way, you really need to be sure the pasta is still very al dente, otherwise it is going to overcook itself with the sauce and turn to mush.

Now we want to serve right away. Remember to add some of the raw pasta as a garnish, and then some fresh parsley on top of that. I didn’t really have any fresh parsley, so I just used some dry parsley – not as nice, but it still works.

The full set of high-quality photos for this recipe are here.

Buon Appetito!

French Toast

If there is any meal I would consider myself an expert in, it’s breakfast. We usually make a pretty big deal of breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays – either with a big breakfast cook-in, or whenever we’re not too lazy, a nice brunch outing. During the week of course I never find the time or inspiration to wake up early and whip up some blueberry pancakes, but I do usually have quite a large breakfast once I roll into the office every day. During the week it’s slightly more healthy – usually some low-fat croissants or some other reasonably healthy carbs, plus some fresh fruit, yoghurt, juice, etc. Breakfast is pretty much the biggest meal of the day for me, and it’s just always been that way.

One of my specialties that I love to break out when guests are over is my “American French Toast” recipe. Well, I thought this was pretty much an American thing, but according to the inter-nets, it’s also popular for breakfast in Europe and Bermuda (really? maybe in the American restaurants..); and is also a big dessert for Christmas time in Portugal and Brazil – I’ll have to double-check with my Brazilian friends on this… Interestingly, I have heard recently that it is a popular dish in Sweden called “Fattiga Riddare“, which means “Poor Knights”. Someone even went to the trouble to put together a full summary of international terms for this dish.

My recipe for French Toast is a simple combination of traditions passed down through the family, with a bit of my own invention. It varies quite a bit from the traditional recipe that I’ve seen all over the internet, which is very simple – basically just bread with eggs and milk, fried.

When I think of French Toast, other than some homemade versions that I remember from childhood, the one that really sticks out in my mind is from a restaurant in Dallas called Bread Winners. They are a combination bakery and restaurant, so they make their french toast with this amazing, freshly baked, triple-thickly sliced sourdough bread, and it is about the most delicious breakfast you can imagine.

So, my dream is to one day plan this out and find a bakery in advance that carries the same kind of fresh sourdough bread, and try my recipe out the right way – but unfortunately, breakfast turns out to generally be a spur of the moment dish for me, and is almost never well thought out or planned in advance. But if you don’t have any of that amazing fresh sourdough, we can make do with a typical loaf of sliced white bread – with a bit of effort, it will still be more than good enough to wow your hung-over or groggy-eyed guests in the morning!

So, let’s get started – first, mise en place with the ingredients:

Note: this quantity will feed 2 or 3 people, depending on how ravenous they are in the morning, and also on whether you put together accompanying dishes such as scrambled eggs, bacon, etc. – so just multiply the proportions to serve as many as you need.

6 pieces of bread – sliced white toast, fresh sourdough, or whatever you prefer.
3 eggs
A few teaspoons of melted butter
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
a couple of pinches of salt
a dash of cinnamon
about a half teaspoon of vanilla
a few tsp olive oil for frying
some milk (optional) – perhaps a few tablespoons?

So, we break the eggs into a bowl and whisk together with the vanilla, and also a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar as well. Also add the milk if you are using it. This time around I left the milk out, which produces a slightly more “toasty” toast, while I guess milk renders the dish a bit more “wet”.

Now, before we can really continue we need to prepare the caramel. This is basically my secret mod on the traditional recipe – I like to sweeten the french toast with my own home-made caramel drizzled over the toast and cooked into it. So, I combine the butter, white sugar, and brown sugar together in a small pan over low heat.

I cook this mixture just long enough to get all of the ingredients to mix together and then sort of liquify into a thick caramel sauce. Be very careful not to burn this at all – as soon as it seems to be liquified enough to be drizzled thickly from a spoon, we can take it off the heat.

Now we can prepare the toast. Since I’m not using the soggy milk approach, I like to really let my toast soak in the eggs for a bit before cooking. We pour our egg mixture onto a flat plate so we can dip our toast into it.

We take each individual slice of toast, dip it into the egg and let it really soak up as much as possible.

Then we drizzle the caramel over the toast and spread it around a bit.

Repeat this on both sides of each piece of bread, and stack all of the bread on another plate, so that the egg mix that drips off the top pieces will just soak in to the pieces underneath.

Pour any leftover egg mix over the remaining toast, and try to get as much of it to soak in as possible. Also spread around any remaining Caramel, moving pieces of bread from the bottom that have already soaked up a lot, to the top of the stack. The idea here is to soak each piece with as much of the mix as possible, and to have a fairly even distribution of all of the ingredients.

Now we prepare the pan for frying the toast. We want to get the pan up to medium hot, so the egg will cook in to the toast relatively quickly. I also like to keep my oven on low heat and just throw the finished bits into the oven to stay warm until I’m ready to serve everything. For this frying, I find that even with a really good pan I need to use oil and not butter, as I tend to just start burning everything when I try to do it with butter, because it needs to be so hot. Anyways, it comes out very nice with oil, so keep it simple I guess.

Once you think the first side might be cooked a bit, go ahead and flip the toast. Be careful not to leave anything too long that it might burn, and if it does start to burn bring your heat down a bit.

It’s normal to get a bit of dark brown here because the caramel can get quite dark after cooking. As long as it’s not completely charred black you should be ok. I also like to go ahead and sprinkle with some cinnamon before sticking the cooked ones in the oven.

I would recommend to put your toast in the oven and prepare some accompaniments. I like to serve with a bit of scrambled eggs and also perhaps some nice smoked streaky bacon. Also a few pieces of fresh fruit can be a nice touch. And in this case I’m serving with a warmed up Bonne Maman cherry compote, in addition of course to the must-have Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup! A dusting of powdered confectioner’s sugar on top provides the final touch that makes this dish look like the real deal.

Although the explanation is detailed and lengthy, the actual preparation is pretty quick once you’ve had a practice run, and you can sneak out of bed and have this prepared before anyone else is awake, and they will rise to the delicious and tempting aromas calling them to the kitchen.

The high-quality photo album for this recipe can be viewed here.

Enjoy!

Pasta alle Zucchine

Ingredients:

200g zucchini, sliced
150g cherry tomatoes
3 cloves of garlic
1-2 slices of onion, chopped
1 spicy red chili pepper
1/3 cup pine nuts
pinch of salt
extra virgin olive oil
fresh cracked pepper
grated parmesan cheese

500g fusilli pasta
sea salt for cooking the pasta

Like many of the recipes in my standard repertoire, my formula for Pasta alle Zucchine is based on technique passed down through the family, with a bit of my own tweaking to bring the dish to perfection. This is a cheap and rather simple recipe, and my quantities usually serve about 4 good-sized portions. Although I generally keep it simple and vegetarian (a true rarity for me!), it is also possible to add something like pancetta cubes or chopped prosciutto to add a protein element to the dish.

So let’s get started. As always, good technique requires we start with mise en place.

I generally prefer to just peel and chop the garlic in half, and throw the whole pieces in for the cooking, and then take them out at the end – but of course you could also just crush the garlic and throw it in if you prefer. The onion and chili pepper get chopped up rather finely. As always, be careful to wash your hands and not touch your eyes after chopping hot chili peppers.

The zucchini should be chopped into discs. It’s not necessary to get these extra-fine or anything – they are going to soften up quite a bit when we cook them, so some thickness is ok. I prefer to leave the skins on, and I think this comes out better in the end – but if you hate skins, feel free to peel them before chopping – I’ve seen this done too.

I throw the chopped zucchini in a bowl and cover with some salt and olive oil while preparing everything else.

I like to use small cherry tomatoes – the particular ones that I like are called “baby plum” tomatoes. I chop each of these into 4 long pieces, and then I like to squeeze out the juice a bit – we aren’t really trying to make a tomato-based sauce here, so they are more like a garnish for additional taste and color. We throw these in a bowl and cover with some more salt and olive oil.

Now we can get cooking. We cover the base of the pan with a bit of oil – not too much.

We put the pan on medium-low heat, and once the oil is hot, we throw in the chopped onions.

We definitely don’t want to burn the onions, so pay attention to the heat. If they are sizzling too much, take them off the heat and turn it down. As soon as they are starting to change color, we can go ahead and add the chili peppers and garlic.

We only need that to cook another 30 seconds or so, and then we have a nicely flavored olive oil base to prepare our zucchini sauce. We put all the zucchini in, and spread them around as much as possible. Notice I’m using a fairly wide pan, to spread the heat around and hopefully cook everything evenly. We can gradually turn the heat up a bit, perhaps to medium flame, to get things really cooking.

Once things are really cooking, as soon as the zucchini is really starting to soften, we can reduce the heat back to medium-low or even just low, and then cover and let this cook for a while.

I prefer to just cook on lower heat and let it keep going and soaking in all the flavor. Keep checking on the sauce and make sure nothing is burning or sticking to the pan, and if so, reduce the heat.

While that’s going, we can get our pasta cooking. We could have done this beforehand, but I like to do everything at once to save time.

I like to use fusilli pasta with my zucchini sauce, because I think it works well with the decimated zucchini bits with their thin layers of skin clinging to the folds in the pasta. But of course you can go with penne or whatever you like.

Another thing we can prep while we are waiting on the sauce is the pine nuts. We basically just want to roast these for a nice flavor, so I throw them in a smaller pan and spread them out and keep turning them until they get a nice brown color.

By now the zucchini should be significantly softened up, and will have soaked up a lot of the oil.

At this point we can go ahead and add the sliced tomatoes. Notice that we are waiting until almost the very end to do this – we want the tomatoes to cook in with the sauce a bit, but we aren’t making a tomato sauce. Assuming nothing is burning here, we can turn the temperature up a notch to get the sauce really cooking, for the final stage. Make sure to stir this up a couple of times while it’s cooking.

Don’t forget to keep an eye on the pasta and get it out of the water once it is cooked and still al dente. The correct way to do this is to get the pasta into a colander and then run cold water over it until the pasta has cooled down and stopped cooking – otherwise you risk the pasta going too soft, which is particularly bad for fusilli, because this kind of pasta is usually a bit more fragile than other types of pasta like penne.

It’s only been a couple of minutes since we added the tomatoes, but by now assuming we put enough heat on the pan, the sauce should be ready.

I like to just put the pasta back in the (still warm) pot that I used to cook it, and then pour the sauce right on top. Oh, before you do this don’t forget to take out the garlic pieces.

I add in the pine nuts and mix the whole thing up. Serve in a deep dish and cover with some fresh cracked pepper and/or grated parmesan cheese, to the taste of each individual.

The full set of high-quality photos for this recipe are here.

Buon appetito!