Pasta with Pecorino and Pepper
- By Katie Roche
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- 19 Jun, 2019
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When I turned 30 earlier this year, my urgent desire to venture outside of the US became even stronger so the next month I just kind of...bought a plane ticket to London. I decided this had to be the year; I have a friend studying over there who could give me a place to stay and make sure I didn't, you know...accidentally walk through the barrier into the wizarding world and not come back. Dan couldn't come with me because of his work, and all my milspouses know you don't hold up your life experiences waiting on 'em...you just go. So I went! And I decided to do a recipe in London.
A big part of the reason I wanted to do a post from London is because I knew the Item Questing there would be different and entertaining and awesome. I hadn't brought the cookbook with me because I knew the recipe was on Food Network, so I looked it up and it automatically gave me the UK version of the site which as all the ingredients listed as what they're called in the UK. That was helpful. This was pretty simple to shop for - just needed cheese, parsley, tagliatelle, and heavy cream, or "double cream" as they call it. Initially, we shopped around for the cheese and went here:
A big part of the reason I wanted to do a post from London is because I knew the Item Questing there would be different and entertaining and awesome. I hadn't brought the cookbook with me because I knew the recipe was on Food Network, so I looked it up and it automatically gave me the UK version of the site which as all the ingredients listed as what they're called in the UK. That was helpful. This was pretty simple to shop for - just needed cheese, parsley, tagliatelle, and heavy cream, or "double cream" as they call it. Initially, we shopped around for the cheese and went here:
I will be dreaming about this forever. But ultimately, we decided to buy regular grocery store cheese for the pasta dish, and Emily chose some interesting cheeses from here for her post-dinner cheese board. She fancy. Anyway, we went to a grocery store called Waitrose, which seemed like a fairly normal store, but of course it had ALL KINDS OF THINGS I had never seen before so I spent way too long in there. Clotted cream ice cream? Yes I will. (I did. And I'm not that interested in any other ice cream anymore, to be honest.) Prawn snack...literally individual servings of shrimp and cocktail sauce, in the ready-to-eat section like how you'd just grab a deli sandwich or something. That cracked me up. And then of course, the different chip flavors which I definitely tried all of. The verdict on the chip flavors is that theirs are WAY BETTER than ours. I have already looked into getting roast chicken chips from Amazon. It's possible. I just feel like I shouldn't because I would pop and not be able to stop. The balsamic vinegar ones were amazing. The only ones I wasn't keen on were prawn cocktail flavored, because prawn cocktail should not be a flavor and cocktail sauce shouldn't even be a thing. By far, my favorite thing I found in there was this:
I've heard that British people call sprinkles "hundreds and thousands" which is apt and hilarious, but this is a new level of amazing: "Lashings of Glitter Strands". Henceforth, the term "sprinkles" is retired; we use LASHINGS OF GLITTER STRANDS. Obviously I bought these - they're honestly not gorgeous but it was mostly for the container. It will forevermore be the container that holds my Lashings of Glitter Strands.
So Ina instructs you to use whole peppercorns and grind them with a mortar and pestle...or, as the guy in a store we went into corrected me when he overheard me say this to Emily, a "pestle and mortar". It really felt like a weird flex to me, to correct the order in which someone used those words. Emily and I made fun of that for the rest of the week. Without that particular tool, however, I had no real way to know if we had the right amount of pepper; Emily and I just took turns tiring out our wrists grinding pepper from one of these regular grocery store pepper mills. When Moritz arrived, one of the dinner guests Emily had invited, we passed that baton to him for a minute to give ourselves a break. This pepper grinding situation really took a village.
This isn't even that much pepper but it took the combined effort of three people taking turns grinding it for probably 10 minutes straight. A mortar and pestle probably would have been more fun, but I'm not entirely sure it would have been easier on the hands. Ina doesn't really go into why exactly she wants you to hand-crush peppercorns...I guess, does she even need to justify herself at this point? Nevertheless, absent proper equipment, we made do.
Aside from excessive and low-yield pepper grinding, there wasn't much other prep that went into this. I chopped this parsley. We stood around and drank wine. I grated an entire wedge of pecorino cheese onto a plate and admired the sheep on the packaging.
Look how cute they are!!! This is what I imagined when I imagined going to England - rom coms led me to believe that I would experience a stuck-in-rural-lane-due-to-sheep-crossing situation AT LEAST once but on the one day I wasn't in London and might have experienced that, I was in England's second largest city and was promptly informed that I would need to go to Wales for that to really be a possibility. I looked into going to Wales. It's only like a three hour car ride from where I was. Nothing is technically "far" in a place that size and just because I was curious, I looked up the square milage of the UK: it is only 93,628 square miles - the whole COUNTRY - as opposed to the state of Alaska, where I am from, which is 663,000 square miles. PLEASE. Wales is laughably close. Let me see some sheep, ya know?
Anyway, regarding this cheese, I was a little skeptical. I've never been the biggest fan of sheep cheeses. I know that sounds weird. There are lots of kinds of sheep cheeses! But inexplicably, they just all taste...sheepy to me. It might be the power of suggestion. It could very well be that once I heard the cheese was made from sheep's milk, and summoned up my memories of the SMELL of sheep, I couldn't disassociate the taste from the smell. But that doesn't make any logical sense, because I LOVE me some cow cheese, and cows smell absolutely atrocious. So it remains a mystery, but sheep cheese is pungent in a way that I find deeply unappealing, and it's one of like, three ingredients flavoring this pasta. Cringe face emoji.
Anyway, regarding this cheese, I was a little skeptical. I've never been the biggest fan of sheep cheeses. I know that sounds weird. There are lots of kinds of sheep cheeses! But inexplicably, they just all taste...sheepy to me. It might be the power of suggestion. It could very well be that once I heard the cheese was made from sheep's milk, and summoned up my memories of the SMELL of sheep, I couldn't disassociate the taste from the smell. But that doesn't make any logical sense, because I LOVE me some cow cheese, and cows smell absolutely atrocious. So it remains a mystery, but sheep cheese is pungent in a way that I find deeply unappealing, and it's one of like, three ingredients flavoring this pasta. Cringe face emoji.
My apologies, but this is the only picture I have of this dish in its complete form. Emily had invited over friends from her PhD program: Moritz, a charming guy from a town called Hahn, Germany; Jaffer, a native Pakistani who brought a chill and affable vibe to the gathering; and his girlfriend Arushka, who is extremely well-traveled and has fascinating anecdotes about growing up in Sri Lanka. I feel that I am justified in having forgotten to take pictures, as I was enjoying the company of one of the most diverse and engaging groups of people in which I've ever had the pleasure to be included. I really am not super sure if anyone loved the food or not - I found it deeply mediocre - but Moritz particularly embodied the spirit of the frugal student in his boisterous consumption of as much free food as was being offered. Though not native to Britain, I think Jaffer and Arushka embody the well-mannered nature of the British to be good-natured about pretty much everything. The real MVP, honestly, was Emily's cheese board. I can't imagine anyone would disagree. Wine + cheese is preferable to most foods, in my opinion.
Overall, this dish was fine but not memorable or particularly full of flavor. I'd say the most memorable thing about it was being made to feel as though owning a mortar and pestle falls under the designation of "basic", as it was included in a book called "Back to Basics". I sympathize with Ina's inflated notions of what constitutes "basic" - I only recently have realized that owning a KitchenAid is NOT basic, but quite luxurious. But honestly? A mortar and pestle? If you can't hand-crush whole peppercorns because you've never forked over $100 to Williams Sonoma for a fancy bowl and stick, laboriously grinding an entire pepper mill's worth of store-bought pepper is fine.
Overall, this dish was fine but not memorable or particularly full of flavor. I'd say the most memorable thing about it was being made to feel as though owning a mortar and pestle falls under the designation of "basic", as it was included in a book called "Back to Basics". I sympathize with Ina's inflated notions of what constitutes "basic" - I only recently have realized that owning a KitchenAid is NOT basic, but quite luxurious. But honestly? A mortar and pestle? If you can't hand-crush whole peppercorns because you've never forked over $100 to Williams Sonoma for a fancy bowl and stick, laboriously grinding an entire pepper mill's worth of store-bought pepper is fine.
For this post, I wanted to combine two summertime flavors into the crisp recipe one of my oldest Alaskan friends passed on to me years ago. Rhubarb, if you're unfamiliar, is a reddish stalk that kind of resembles really big celery. It's very tart and is most commonly paired with strawberry. I've rarely seen it star in its own show dessert-wise, but my friend Kylee has been making rhubarb crisp for years and it's the best crisp I know of. Blueberries are usually in season in late summer; I have not been home for a blueberry season since Dan's last deployment in 2018 so in order to make this recipe I actually used blueberries from a friend's parents' farm in upstate SC! They're a little sweeter than the blueberries I'd have picked at home, but they worked well. I'm going to pretend like I was actually picking blueberries at home in Alaska for the purpose of showing you what that would look like.
I was getting all ready to write this post, going through my process with photos starting in my kitchen when I realized that a lot of my friends probably don't know what fireweed is or where it comes from and this recipe actually starts far, far away from my kitchen. This will be the first of a few posts highlighting iconic Alaskan ingredients. I've wanted to do this for a while because my home inspires me in so many ways, writing and cooking particular among them. Fireweed is a wildflower that is rather ubiquitous in southcentral Alaska and is often considered a gauge for how long summer will last. It is said that when the blooms reach the top of the plant, winter is six weeks away. Whether or not that's accurate, fireweed is found all over in late summer in Alaska. Here is some I spotted in mid-July by Eklutna Lake:
If you know Dan and me very well, you probably know by now that if our life were a sitcom, he'd low-key be the funniest character. Because that is true, I thought I'd include his bottom ten with accompanying remarks before giving the actual bottom ten. His are hilarious, but aren't as legitimate as mine because he actually tried way fewer of these than one might think. I realized as he was flipping through the book that my old coworker Cam probably ate more of these foods than anyone else did. The overarching theme of Dan's song of Ina Garten hatred is not the actual taste of the finished product but more how asinine he finds that particular recipe to be. So here you are, Dan's bottom ten.
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
#1: Butternut Squash Soup
You guys asked for my top ten from the blog, so here we go! And I'm thinking that what you *really* want is actually the bottom ten, so I'll go ahead and give you those next week. That post will probably be A LOT funnier. While preparing to write this post, I had Dan flip through the cookbook to give me HIS top ten and he was all disgruntled as he did so and only came up with eight that he even liked at all. "I'm not a picky eater!" he insists. Yeah ok. Although to be fair, I've seen some cookbooks I would only make, like, one thing out of and plenty I'd make nothing out of, though sometimes that's because I find the chef so annoying. @ the Pioneer Woman. I just don't trust someone who puts sour cream in spaghetti and then bakes it. Plus all her recipe intros are about, like, Ladd or Tadd or whatever the heck her husband's name is "coming in from the fields starving for dinner". If I came in from working in a field and you tried to give me sour cream spaghetti, I'd be like, "How about a hot pocket instead? Thx." Anyway, this is not Dan's blog so these are not his top ten. You can ask him which ones he liked, but you'll end up in a long convo about how much he hates Ina Garten. Anyway, these are not ranked or anything, they're just in order from the cookbook.
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
So with that, #1: Juice of a Few Flowers
It was Sunday afternoon and I thought to myself, "What a perfect time to make jam!" I mean, how positively quaint: just sitting in my home in suburbia, finished with weekend chores, relaxing with some knitting...why not? Why not make some jam? I mean, obviously my afternoon-kitchen-activity was directed toward jam-making because it was next up in the book BUT whatever, I was kind of excited! Also, this is the last recipe in this book!!! I'm still in the process of deciding what I'll do now, so if there's something you'd like me to make and tell you about in my own fashion - you know, with lots of tangents and jokes - please do let me know! I'll likely continue to tackle Ina content, but may start including some recipe faves and/or foods people text me about a lot! I get a lot of cake questions, a LOT of frosting questions (because meringue buttercream is bae and I've got everyone in my social circles who eats my food on board), and a lot of fish questions. So look for more food to come, even though this is the last recipe in Back to Basics.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
We went to Publix to ItemQuest for this and Dan said, "Don't we already have strawberries???" And I had to confess that I had eaten them all because it's honestly amazing how good fruit can be when it's 1) in season, 2) somewhat local, and 3) not ludicrously expensive. I'm about to travel home to Alaska for about a month, and it's going to put a real damper on my current fruit-snacking habits when I go into Fred Meyer for some strawbs and they're like, $7/lb and already trying to be moldy. Also needed blueberries (partly for the jam, mostly for the snax), one Granny Smith apple, and more superfine sugar. Publix had all of these things, plus about a million old people 'cause Sunday + Publix = Old People City.
I was glad Ina gave me something easy for this week, because I was packing for Alaska and just *did not have the time* to mess with hunting lobsters or weird cheeses from the internet or whatever. ItemQuest was fairly straightforward, just took Dan a trip to the liquor store next to the Publix for some limoncello. I grabbed this particular lemon curd in the British aisle of Publix; I think last time an Ina recipe called for lemon curd I bought it from Trader Joe's and it was DISGUSTING. I mean, truly awful. I would like to recommend making your own lemon curd if you have the time and the inclination. Ina's lemon curd recipe is phenomenal and it is one thing for which I can say she is truly correct: homemade is BETTER and store-bought is not at all as good. The most beloved cupcakes I have ever made were filled with Ina's lemon curd, and had the lemon curd mixed into the meringue buttercream frosting. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!! Anyway, the rest of this was fruit that I had on hand, mint, and Greek yogurt which we did have to buy because I don't, as a rule, eat Greek yogurt of my own free will. It's chalky and disgusting.
Dates are something I honestly never even thought about until I did Whole 30. I have mentioned my Whole 30 experience several times over the course of this journey through Back to Basics, but if you're new to reading the blog, this is what happened: I did Whole 30 one time, just to prove that I could, because salvation-by-diet apologists were obsessed with it as the newest fad in righteous eating practices. It was a terrible experience; on top of hating every minute of it for myself and finding exactly zero wellness benefits, I also hated it for Dan who was not allowed to eat popcorn for 30 days. Dan is in love with popcorn; his addiction to it is almost at the level of my addiction to coffee. He gets rage-y without it. But anyway, Whole 30 recipes are big into dates as sweeteners and some of the things you can eat, like Lara Bars, are made with dates. Dates are impossibly chewy. I ate more of them in that 30 days than I ever wanted to, and now when I see them in recipes I can't help but think of that Whole 30. Fortunately for me, I got to begin this recipe by chopping TWO CUPS' worth of dates. Oh, they also kind of look like cockroach bodies, so there's that. The only thing I actually had to get at the store for this was oranges! I had everything else on hand, even Cointreau, thanks to many previous Ina recipes.
Alright so, I'm not the Muffin Man. I don't really make a whole lot of muffins, for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being that on the rankings of breakfast foods they definitely do not crack the top five, maybe not even the top ten. If I have an option for a bagel or a waffle, I'll pick one of them over a muffin every single time. I also prefer cereal, cinnamon rolls, or *cue eye roll* avocado toast. I've just never risen from my slumber and been like, "You know what would really hit the spot right now? A MUFFIN." But!!! In recent months, since my friend Logan came into my life, I've been making muffins a lot more frequently because he really loves them. So the last blueberry muffins I made were from a 99cent Betty Crocker mix packet which he brought into my house and asked me sweetly to make, because they're what he grew up with and along with many preservatives, they are full of nostalgia for him. Here is Logan and me, preparing to mix the muffin batter. Out of respect (and to make up for the disrespect of rolling up with muffin mix), he wore one of my aprons. I will treasure this picture forever.
You guys...Ina has "a thing" about commercial granola bars. Her beef with them, apparently, is that they say they contain real fruit and nuts but that all she sees when she looks at the labels are like, ten different kinds of corn syrup. I'm going to go ahead and guess, just based on this, that none of the lunches her mom packed for her growing up contained any Fruit By the Foot. And surely if we introduced her to Gushers, she would die. This is a real shame. I also feel like this disdain for corn syrup is maybe just a tad self-righteous, coming from the woman whose frosting recipe calls for literally six entire sticks of butter. At that point, what's a little corn syrup to you really? People's nutritional hills-to-die-on really fascinate me (and also kind of annoy me sometimes) and the ones about sugar might get me the most. I feel like, at some point, sugar is sugar and whether you're baking with honey, white sugar, brown sugar, molasses, maple syrup, etc you're still probably making something that's not amazing for you so, in terms of sugar, why not just be in for a penny in for a pound, amirite? So while I'm on this topic, before I even get to the actual point (please, I know you're here for the tangents), I would like to just let anyone and everyone know that I'm absolutely not interested in your "healthy substitutes" for things that taste good in their original form. I do not WANT a chocolate chip pancake made out of bananas and grains you harvested in your field this morning. If I want a banana I will eat one, and if I want a chocolate chip pancake I will eat one, and that's that. And DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT come @ me with "cashew cheese". Just don't. I don't even think I should honor that concept with an explanation of why it's so wrong. If that's not self-evident, I can't help you.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
So down to the granola bar ingredients. I rolled up to Kroger only to find that their already meager bulk bins had been EMPTIED because if you scoop dates into a bag and then someone else scoops dates into a bag, you might get the coronavirus. I'm glad they've taken the precaution of removing this shopping option, since I cannot resisting licking my hands after every grocery trip I make. Thankfully, they still had the lil tower of small containers of some of the weirder items right there in the organic section, which was where I was able to find dates. The rest of this stuff was on the baking aisle, with the exception of wheat germ which was, for some reason, with the cereal. I'm still kind of unclear on what wheat germ is actually used for by people, and the context of it being located on the cereal aisle makes me wonder even more. Do people eat it like grape nuts? Sprinkle it on stuff like how people like to do with nutritional yeast right now? ("It tastes just like cheese!" You know what else tastes like cheese? Actual cheese. You're welcome.) Anyway, I was very grateful that Kroger at least had everything I needed and I didn't have to go on a for real ItemQuest.
At first I saw the pictures of this and thought, "YAY!!! Cinnamon rolls!" And then a couple of weeks ago, I actually tried making cinnamon rolls for the first time and realized that my inability to roll/shape/slice yeast doughs is still a thing. AND THEN I read this entire recipe and realized these get filled with raisins. So here we go!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!
ItemQuest was only dramatic because the stores just DID NOT have puff pastry sheets; I was only finding it in "shells". I tried Bi-Lo and Dan tried Food Lion before he finally located sheets at Publix. The rest of the ingredients, I already had on hand!