Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in the Kitchen (15 page)

5.
Just before serving, toss in the tortilla chips. Whisk the dressing—or shake it, if it’s in a jar—to recombine, and add about half of it to the salad. Toss to coat, and give it a taste. You might want to add the rest of the dressing right now, or bring it to the table (along with the pepper mill) for people to add more to their own portions. Top with the tomato slices and a few grinds of black pepper, and serve immediately.

JICAMA

Jicama (HEE-ka-ma), that large, brown potato-like thing you may have pondered in the produce section, is a great addition to pretty much any salad. It has the crunchy texture of a radish with the mild, somewhat sweet, starchy flavor of a water chestnut. Look for one on the small side, which will have more flavor. Use a sharp paring knife to cut off a chunk as large as you think you’ll need, and then peel that piece with the knife. Discard the peel, and cut the flesh into slices or sticks for snacking on, dipping into guacamole or salsa, and tossing into salads. Or serve jicama sticks as a party nibble, drizzled with lime juice and dusted with chili powder.

Pasta: Limitless Possibilities

In terms of dinnertime readiness, pasta is your culinary insurance policy. Keep a few kinds in the cupboard, and you’re always pretty much covered. In this chapter, you’ll find a number of good, dependable pasta dishes to look forward to eating at the end of a full day. Most of them can be ready in the time it takes the water to boil and the pasta to cook. But there’s an even simpler recipe you can always follow: Just about any pasta, plus just about any ingredients, plus olive oil, garlic, black pepper, red pepper flakes, and Parmesan cheese, and you’ve got yourself a meal.

Often, a pasta meal can be accomplished simply by combining a few flavorful things (like some leftover chicken or vegetables) in a bowl with a little olive oil, then tossing in some hot pasta and letting the pasta warm everything upon contact. You can save a bit of the pasta cooking water before you drain the pasta and stir a few tablespoons into the dish. In addition to helping to heat the ingredients and moisten things up, the pasta cooking water has a bit of salt and starch in it that will help bring the flavors together.

Or put some olive oil in a skillet that has been warmed over medium heat, add whatever ingredients you think might work—mushrooms, that same leftover chicken, that one last zucchini (sliced) and Roma tomato (diced)—along with a bit of minced garlic. When the pasta is cooked, drain it and toss it into the skillet, adding a bit more olive oil and some pasta water till it all looks saucy.

A “designer” sausage or two (like chicken-apple or basil–dried tomato) will go a long way toward turning a little pasta and a handful of leftovers into a tasty, substantial dinner. Brown the sausages in a little oil in a skillet, then slice them and toss them with the pasta.

Then there are the endless possibilities of pasta and red sauce. I’ve provided a basic recipe for making it from scratch—either vegetarian (marinara) or with ground meat (Bolognese). If you’d prefer to just use some out of a jar, that’s fine (and there are some really good ones available). Find brands of marinara or other tomato-based pasta sauces you like. The variety and quality is improving all the time, so explore and expand your horizons. Heat and toss with cooked pasta, or doctor with anything from vegetables to canned tuna or leftover cooked chicken, meat, or fish.

And finally, you can take Italian-style pasta in an Asian direction just by adding a few well-chosen ingredients, like soy sauce, oyster sauce, toasted sesame oil, fresh ginger, garlic, scallions, and cilantro. Or, even easier, buy a prepared Asian sauce (such as curry or sweet and sour), or use the super-versatile peanut sauce on Chapter 3: Pastas as a base to create your own homemade Asian-style noodle bowls.

Finally, when you haven’t shopped in a week and there appears to be nothing edible anywhere in your kitchen, toss any kind of pasta with a little butter or olive oil and some Parmesan. For more flavor, add parsley, garlic, Roasted Garlic Paste (Chapter 1: Soups), and/or red pepper flakes. It’s comforting, warm, cheap,
fast, and tasty. Think of it as moving beyond ramen noodles.

And those are the basics of your pasta insurance policy. Keep a bunch of packages around. They’ll last for a year or more, and they’ll always be there when you need them.

PASTA SHAPES

Pasta shapes are endless, and in cultures where pasta rules (like Italy and much of Asia), there are all kinds of sacred creeds about which shape best holds and complements which sauce. That’s all good, but in your kitchen, here’s a rule you can use: Any pasta will really go with any sauce (just don’t repeat this to an Italian). Tradition pairs pesto with a long pasta like linguine, chunky meat sauces with tubular pastas like rigatoni, and so on. If you’d like to learn more about this, by all means buy a good Italian cookbook. But guess what: Rigatoni with pesto and linguine with meat sauce are fabulous, too, so stock up on the shapes and types you like, and experiment. If you cook any kind of pasta well and add the right amount of something tasty to it, you can’t go wrong.

QUANTITIES

Four ounces (¼ pound) of dry pasta per person is a basic formula to remember, and the recipes in this chapter are based on that amount. If you and whomever you’re cooking for have smallish appetites—or if you’re making a dish with a lot of other ingredients—you may find that those 4 ounces are more than you need per person. But with pasta, it’s better to err on the side of too much, rather than too little—you won’t add much expense, and you’ll end up with tasty leftovers. You don’t need to actually weigh the pasta; just eyeball based on the weight of the full package. For spaghetti, a bundle about the size of a quarter (as in the coin) is about 4 ounces.

When it comes to quantities of sauce and other ingredients, remember, pasta is forgiving. A little more, a little less…it all tends to work out in the end. In other words, if a recipe calls for a 24-ounce jar of sauce and you’ve got a 26-ounce jar, go ahead and use it all.

OLIVE OIL

Buy two kinds: one that’s relatively inexpensive, which you can use for sautéing things and for dressing pasta in general, and one high-quality extra-virgin oil that has a lot of flavor (and usually a higher price tag), which you can use in combination with the cheaper oil. Here’s the rub: The less you cook the oil, the more you’ll be able to tell the difference a good extra-virgin will make. So use it sparingly, in pastas (and other dishes) in which it’s added toward the end of cooking, or drizzled on as a garnish.

GET THIS PASTA SHAPES

Familiar favorites

• Spaghetti
  
• Linguine
  
• Fettuccine
  
• Rigatoni
  
• Macaroni
  
• Penne
  
• Angel hair
  
• Lasagna noodles
  

And a few less common ones to check out

• Orecchiette (“little ears”—great with chunky sauces)
  
• Gemelli (“twins”—double-helix spirals with great texture)
  
• Orzo (looks like grains of rice; add to soups or toss with feta)
  
• Campanelle (aka trombette: ruffle-edged trumpets—fun shape, lots of texture, great with roasted vegetables)
  

GET THIS PASTA STAPLES TO STOCK

• Jarred tomato sauce (marinara, roasted vegetable, mushroom, etc.)
  
• Canned tomatoes (sauté with garlic and onion to make a quick sauce)
  
• Tomato paste in a tube (stores almost indefinitely in the refrigerator; unlike a can, the tube lets you use as much as you like and reseal the rest)
  
• Parmesan cheese (buy a chunk and grate as needed for best flavor)
  
• Really good olive oil (extra-virgin is usually the best bet), for drizzling as a finishing touch
  
• Capers (toss into all kinds of pastas for a salty, tangy hit of flavor)
  
• Olives (buy pitted ones, or smash them with the heel of your hand to extract the pit; use as you would capers)
  
• Anchovies or anchovy paste. (Don’t be squeamish—a hint adds lots of flavor and most people who “hate anchovies” turn out not to when they don’t know they’re there. Case in point: Caesar salad. And, of course, strict vegetarians can just read on.)
  
• Red pepper flakes (use both in cooking and for sprinkling at the table)
  
• Garlic (if you’re not into mincing, invest in a garlic press)
  
• Frozen peas (surprisingly good in all kinds of pastas)
  

TIMING AND COOKING

If you’re planning to have pasta for dinner, it’s usually a good idea to put the pot of water on the stove to heat before you do anything else, because it takes a while to come to a boil. And since a watched pot never boils, once it’s on the stove, you can get busy preparing the sauce or ingredients you’ll be using to dress the pasta.

Traditional methods call for using plenty of water—a few quarts for a half-pound of pasta to allow the noodles to swim around freely. (Current discussion in the food world, based on experiments by noted food expert Harold McGee, notes that there are benefits
to cooking pasta in a much smaller quantity of water. However, that requires more monitoring by the cook, and I want to keep this as easy for you as possible. So, let’s stay traditional for now.) Add a tablespoon of salt to the pasta water. The pasta will absorb some of it and take on more flavor. There’s no need to add olive oil (or any kind of oil) to pasta water.

When it’s time to add the pasta, toss it into the water and give it a good stir so the pieces don’t settle and stick together. Once the water returns to a full, rolling boil, there’s no need to keep stirring it as long as you have plenty of water in the pot.