Speaking as someone who is learning to cook for a living, I’ve got a sad, embarrassing confession for you: I’m just not that into cooking meals at home these days. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I’m on my feet at 5AM and I’m baking biscuits by 6. Or maybe it’s an over-saturation of the senses, the intoxicating smell of pan-caramelized apples wafting up at me, and the constant bombardment of sauteed garlic, homey herbs, and savory braise smells of the creations from another cook, desensitizing my desire for good food. Whatever the cause, when the time to cook when the day’s end rolls around, I’ve been struggling to muster much enthusiasm.

I’ve come up with a counter-intuitive solution to my problem by challenging myself to only cook dinners that I’m genuinely excited about eating. They don’t have to be hard recipes or take hours to make, in fact most of them so far have been made up on the fly. They do need to be dishes I’ll look forward to eating, meals worthy of opening a moderately priced bottle of wine to enjoy midweek. To select these recipes, I pause and ask myself, as I’m heading by the store on the way home, “what am I hungry for?” And then, I make that thing. So far, it’s been a success.

The other night, I was jonesing for fresh pasta – something that I’ve practiced enough to confidently make whenever I need it, as long as I have a spare hour available for the dough to do its requisite chilling in the fridge.

I had portobellos, shiitakes, and a block of parmesan cheese, and I began to conceive of a meal that I became very excited about, indeed.

I sauteed the mushrooms in garlic, white wine, and  lemon juice, and finished them with just a dash of heavy cream, creating a mushroom-wine sauce that coated each strand of the al dente pasta, without overwhelming it.  A sprinkle of grated parmesan  added some sharp, creamy flavor, and the tender, meaty mushrooms stood up well with the pasta. A simple meal, nothing groundbreaking here, but also an exciting one for me, and that’s the most important thing when you’re cooking your way out of a slump.

Mushroom Fettuccine

I’m not going to provide exact ingredient amounts here, since so much of this recipe is suited to taste. Use this as inspiration to create your own pasta craving.

Serves 2, with leftovers

1/2 lb . shiitake, crimini, portobello, or other favorite mushrooms, sliced uniformly
fresh fettuccine pasta, either homemade (use my guide) or store-bought (enough for 2 people)
olive oil
2-3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
lemon, squeezed
a glass of dry white wine (or more, to taste)
grated parmesan cheese
dash of heavy cream
salt
black pepper

Cook pasta until al dente. Drain and set aside.

In a large frying pan, heat enough olive oil to coat the pan generously, on med-low. Add the garlic and saute in the oil until it is translucent, stirring occasionally. Lower the heat if the garlic starts browning too quickly. Add the mushrooms, stirring to evenly coat them in the oil and garlic mixture. If the mushrooms seem dry or are sticking, add a little more oil. Cook for a few minutes until they become a bit limp and flexible, then add lemon juice and wine. Simmer until the mushrooms are done to your preference, add a little water  or additional wine if the liquid cooks off too fast. Stir in the heavy cream right at the end, toss the pasta into the mixture, only long enough to heat up to desired temperature. Add salt, pepper, and parmesan cheese to taste. Serve immediately.

You don’t have to talk to me for very long about cooking before the conversation will come around to how I think Jamie Oliver is a genius. He is a champion of non-fussy home cooking, as illustrated by the type of recipes he creates (modern takes on classics, refreshingly free from snotty attitude) and the ingredients that he chooses. 

His book Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook is the first I consult when planning casual evening meals with friends. It stars a lot of interesting flavors that are perfect for serving family-style that are the best kinds of food for wrapping up a weekend and catching up over some wine, eeking out every last drop of leisure and avoiding the topic of the work week ahead.

I’d had my eye on this recipe for honeycomb cannelloni for a while, just waiting for an excuse to make it. I caught my chance a few weeks ago, when I had the pleasure of hosting some dear old friends for a special reunion of sorts.

It had been ages since my friend Jillian and I had seen our friend Graig, who was in town visiting from the Dominican Republic, so I decided to invite them, with their significant others, over for an early supper. Jillian and her boyfriend Chris are regular visitors of the East Village Kitchen, but it was the first time that Graig had ever stepped food in my place, since he has been living in the Dominican Republic for the past four years working as the founding principal at a school there. This particular visit was even more special because Graig brought his fiancee Alice with him, and it was very exciting to meet her for the first time.

This is a pretty serious baked pasta dish, which involves anchoring cannelloni pasta (I had a bear of a time finding cannelloni, and finally had to settle on some sort of handmade, extra large pasta tubes that I think are just jumbo ziti) in layers of a delicious vegetable sauce, sauteed spinach, and a sauce of creme fraiche and Parmesan cheese (I substituted some goat cheese for part of the creme fraiche with excellent results). I was excited about taking some really dramatic finishing results of the honeycomb pattern on top, but I was so wrapped up in entertaining, I forgot to pay much attention to the photography. You’ll have to trust me that this looks really cool and tastes absolutely amazing. 

Honeycomb Cannelloni
Adapted from Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook by Jamie Oliver

serves 6-8

For the vegetable ragu

A small handful of dried porcini

1/2 cup plus 3 tablespoons olive oil

3 carrots, peeled and diced

4 sticks of celery, trimmed and finely diced

1 large red onion, peeled and finely diced

1 leek, trimmed and outer leaves discarded, finely diced

2 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced

5 Portobello mushrooms, finely chopped

5x 14-oz cans good-quality plum tomatoes

For the spinach

For the quick white sauce

This recipe involves fresh pasta. To learn how to make fresh pasta at home, see my last post.

Sometimes we start out a recipe with the best intentions of carrying it through, only to be struck by creativity and veer far from the directions on the page. That is exactly how Jamie Oliver’s Open Stained-Glass Lasagne with Roasted Squash turned into Lauren’s Open Lasagne with Acorn Squash Puree, in all of it’s smooth, spicy, nutty deliciousness.

I started out wanting to make this recipe because it is intended to feature a beautiful homemade pasta consisting of thin sheets of lasagna rolled with fresh herbs between the doubled layers, producing a stunning stained-glass effect.  Jamie Oliver made it look so pretty, I just had to try! Only one problem, I had a senior moment at the market and completely forgot to buy the necessary herbs.

Without the beautiful pasta, the roasting didn’t seem quite right to me. I was feeling more like a silky smooth, thick squash-velvet. And I wanted it loaded with spice and flavor.  I kept Jamie’s spice recommendations…

…but opted to steam the squash and then puree it instead.

Which still was a little too thin for my liking. But that’s why cheesecloth was invented! If you have lived this long without a cheesecloth, you are really doing yourself a disservice – there are a million uses and they cost a few bucks and last for a very long time. Here I’ve quadrupled the cheesecloth and put it in a strainer with the squash over a pot to let the water drain out for approximately 20 minutes.

After the squash was drained of excess liquid, it was think and creamy, just what I was looking for.

I put it in a saucepan with 1/4 cup of vegetable stock, to add a little flavor and give it enough liquid to reheat it without burning (the liquid evaporates away) over low heat.

All that’s left to do is spoon this mixture between folds of a single strand of lasagna. For kitchen control freaks, this free-form pasta creation might be maddening, but I myself found it quite liberating (so much so that I forgot to take a picture). Garnish liberally with fresh grated Parmiggano Reggano and a drizzle of olive oil. 

Lauren’s Open Lasagne with Acorn Squash Puree
Inspired by Jamie Oliver’s recipe in Cook with Jamie: My Guide to Making You a Better Cook

Fresh lasagne strips (see recipe here)

Although I am not exactly sure when the first time I had fresh pasta was, I’m guessing that it was the first Christmas that I had teeth enough to chew it. Once a year, several days before the holiday, my grandmother would bring out her huge, heavy wooden board and a long rolling pin and the kneading, punching, pounding, slapping, and eventually, the endless hand rolling would commence, often lasting for two days – all for the moment when we would sit down to the famous first course of Christmas dinner, ravioli in homemade chicken stock.

Others in our family have tried to match my grandmother’s pasta-making skills, but none of us have succeeded in recreating the experience of biting into those tenderest of tender little pillows. We also all concluded that while the end result may be worth it, none of us had the fortitude, patience, or upper body strength to make the amount required to feed the entire family (turns out that my grandmother is superwoman encased in a tiny Italian woman’s body).  For although the process begins with the innocent whisking of eggs with a fork on a mound of flour, the process soon becomes physically taxing, with or without the pasta rolling machine.

The more the mixture integrates, the harder this gets, until you are using your fingers to work the dough.

But work the dough you must, kneading and then pounding, pushing and pulling, until sticky changes  to rough and stiff, and finally…

…the dough becomes a very smooth, very hard mound, which requires airtight wrapping and refrigeration. This will give you time to rest those sore muscles.

I’ve made pasta a few times at home now but this is the first time that I’ve ever had the luxury of using a pasta rolling machine, which became mine when my mother lost patience with pasta making and passed it on to me. I’ve never asked Grammy how she feels about pasta machines, but I’m sure she would not approve.

It saves you a lot of the pain of rolling, but it is still hand crank and a much easier process when done with two people – one person to crank, the other to guide the pasta through the machine. I was fortunate to have Brian there to help me with the cranking and photography.

After you refrigerate your dough for at least one hour, you remove it from the fridge and cut it into inch thick slices, which you should try to flatten a bit with your fingers before feeding them into the machine. The first time through, the machine should be set to it’s largest setting. If you have no machine, no worries, with some elbow grease and a rolling pin (of uniform diameter, not tapered) you can achieve the desired results, just like Grammy.

The dough going through the first couple times will look sad – full of holes and weak. Just put it back together as best you can, and double the dough back over on itself and run it through again.

After running it through doubled once on the largest setting, reduce the size to 5 (assuming you are on a 1 to 10 scale). The machine will help shape it into the right width, but it’s ok if it’s not perfect. It will get smoother and more silky each time.

Retune the machine down to your desired thickness and run it through a final time. Your pasta sheets will be firm and resilient. Try to lay them out flat – this was a challenge for me due to size limitations in the East Village Kitchen.

But there you have it. Actual homemade pasta, destined for two beautiful dishes – which will be revealed in my next two posts!

Fresh Pasta Recipe

5 cups flour (if you can get your hands on type 00, this is the best to use – it’s a bit finer. Otherwise, all-purpose works fine)

6 eggs (free-range is ideal)