Italy Part 25

That is the last [spaghetti] straw!!  This week marks the end of cooking pastas and risottos for my Italian cooking challenge. Noodle dishes have traditionally meant quick, last-minute meals requiring little more than a jar of store-bought tomato sauce. However, these dishes take basic pasta and rice to higher creative heights!

Penne alla napolitana (p. 109)

This dish can be made in under 40 minutes because the sauce can cook while the pasta cooks. It just takes a little bit of preparation of the wonderful vegetable medley that the sauce requires.  Ingredients include onion, garlic, carrot, celery, tomatoes (canned, crushed), and tomato paste. After tossing the hot pasta with the sauce, stir in a bit of freshly torn basil leaves and then sprinkle with parmesan. Simple and satisfying! 

The penne is hiding behind a handful of shredded parmesan.

Spaghetti with sardines, fennel and tomato (p. 111)

This dish was one of those things that I should not have saved until the last moment... fennel is now out of season and I couldn't find it at my grocery stores!  Thank goodness I had saved some fennel stalks, which I had chopped up and kept in my freezer for a future creative experiment (I was thinking of using it as chicken stuffing along with some orange slices). Because of its extra fibrous nature, as compared to the fennel bulb, I steamed them for about 20 minutes using the hot water for the pasta before cooking further in the sauce as the recipe directed. Another problem ingredient was finding sardine fillets. I had stumbled across this same problem when preparing Stuffed sardines last month, and resorted to the next best thing... canned. The ingredient list for this dish is so eclectic! But the savory and sweet flavors blended very nicely. I would recommend trying the olive oil bread crumbs that this recipe asked for as a topping on your favorite pasta dish, too!

The sardines that I used to replace fresh fillets.
They are smaller and more delicate but since they are going
into a sauce, I thought they were an adequate substitute.

The sauce with all of its components:
garlic, fennel (stalks in this case), red onions,  raisins,
toasted pine nuts, anchovy fillets, white wine, tomato
pasta, fresh parsley, sardine and some bread
crumbs sauteed in olive olive. 

Despite the laundry list for ingredients, the finished product
was beautiful! Individual servings were topped with sprinkling
of some reserved olive oil bread crumbs and fresh parsley.

Seafood risotto (p. 116)

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous dish! I equate this savory Italian rice dish to a quick version of Spanish paella. Seafood ingredients included squid hoods and tentacles (reserved and frozen from my first squid recipe), raw shrimp, clams and fresh scallops. While the seafood was being gently sauteed in butter and olive oil, fish stock (reserved from preparing the Insalata di frutti di mare recipe) was simmering with white wine and saffron threads. After the seafood was cooked, it was removed from the frying pan and chopped onions and garlic were cooked until golden. Then, special arborio rice (recommended for risottos) was stirred into the cooked onions and garlic. Little by little, the hot broth mixture was added to the rice. This step is what makes risottos so unique! The result is a tender, but not mushy, creamy rice. The last steps included mixing the seafood, chopped tomatoes and parsley into the piping hot rice to get this...

Risotto for a special Friday night meal!
Note: Risotto is like a blank canvas for cooks.
Anything can be added to the rice, such as asparagus
and sun-dried tomatoes, left over seafood and peas,
various cheeses with mushrooms... etc, etc.