Red Pepper Cream Sauce

...with fresh pasta (of course).  This was a "what do we have in the fridge" meal.  I know, the idea is to go to the market every day, which I sometimes did when we lived across town near Mercato Sant'Ambrogio, but the one near us at Porta Romana is much smaller and more expensive, so we usually do a big run to Sant'Ambrogio once a week (better and cheaper trumps walking further) and augment it with stops to the lady selling produce out of her piaggio truck (can you call it a truck if it has 3 wheels and is the size of a large refrigerator?) at the base of our hill.

We had a pepper left.  And a lemon which had missed its purpose in life.  I wanted to get at the sweetness of the red pepper (we bought it to roast on the grill but this one got left over) so I sauteed it on a fairly high flame with olive oil, garlic and pancetta cut into thick matchsticks until the pepper started to get soft, then added cooking cream (which is somewhere in between heavy cream and butter, moving towards the butter side of the force) and a bit of paprika to intensify the pepper effect.  Zested the lemon and added the zest near the end of cooking.  I don't always remember this step, but after the pasta had cooked it got added to the sauce to really soak up the flavors.

Pumpkin (zucca) tart

When we first arrived in Florence last October, we experienced the fortunate misfortune of having a fair bit of confusion with our apartment rental. Under the false impression that one must have an address to apply for an Italian visa, we frantically arranged lodging for ourselves via the internet days before submitting our visa applications. Breathing a sigh of relief, we left our passports and all kinds of paper work with the Italian consulate in Portland (OR) towards the end of August, and figured we were pretty much all set. But approximately 2 days before departure, I received an apologetic e-mail from the rental agency explaining that there had been a small mix-up with dates and the apartment we reserved for the year wouldn’t be available until early November (a problem because we were due to arrive on October 5). In compensation for our inconvenience, they kindly offered us a bigger place in a more central location for our first month at the same price we were to pay for our original apartment. Not having much other choice and figuring the pictures they sent looked pretty good, we agreed to the change. Typically, though, all was not settled. The next morning, I was greeted by another apologetic e-mail saying that new apartment wasn’t available after all, but they had another even bigger place that was even close to our eventual apartment and thus would make moving simple. This place, they warned, might be a tad noisy because it was near the train tracks, but it was nevertheless very nice and worth much more than we would be paying for it. With some help from google maps, we discovered in dismay that the “near” the train tracks meant literally overlooking the train tracks and Campo di Marte, one of Florence’s major train stations. Attractive is not exactly the word one would use to describe the location (at least not based on photos from google street view), and to someone who is not a sound sleeper (me), train noise all night didn’t sound very appealing at all. So this time we wrote back asking if they had anything else.

Experimental Studies in Brown: Chestnut Crepes with Coffee-Sausage Gravy

The experimental part was not the coffee gravy -- we've been doing that occasionally for the better part of a year, ever since we discovered that bechamel with coffee works (quite well, really).  The experimental bit was the chestnut flour that Lauren decided we needed to buy at the Coop (one of the 2 large supermarkets in Florence) yesterday.  Like, I imagine, most Americans, I've never used chestnut flour before.  I know some of the things Italian's use it for, but while they look quite pretty most of the ones I've tried taste rather less so.  Not that my tasting has been that extensive, but the point is that we had almost no idea what to do with the stuff.  Which is why we tried crepes -- ok, we tried pasta first, but with only a 1/4 cup of flour added to our normal 00/semiola mix.  It turns out that chestnut flour works fairly well for crepes (and didn't seem to make a huge difference for the pasta).  The texture is a bit different from wheat or buckwheat, but not too far into the rubbery and they end up having a nice light sweetness.  They also went very well with the sausage and coffee gravy.

Porcini Ravioli

It now feels well and truly like summer has fled, which is a little sad, but mostly happy, because it's not ragingly hot anymore and most of the German tourists have gone home (to be replaced by American undergrads, to be sure, but still).   Also, porcinis are now in season!  Which means a lot of good things, but about 2 weeks ago it meant porcini ravioli.  Our first experiment with making fresh pasta was actually with a porcini/champignon/truffle filled tortelloni Lauren and her classmate Emily made for their adviser, so these have a bit of happy history for us.

Fresh Pasta

We’ve been making fresh pasta with some regularity for the last year or so, spurred on at first by Carlalberto Relli of le piantagioni del caffe asking us to make a savory coffee dinner last winter (we’ll share our savory coffee discoveries at some point, but not just now) and continued because fresh pasta is both better and cheaper than dried pasta.  Yes, here in Italy, where good cheap pasta can be had for €0.78 a kilo.  We can get type 00 flour for about €0.29 a kilo, so the math works out well.  Plus, Lauren finds it intriguing (not that I don't as well, it's just that the actual making of the pasta itself seems to fall on the baking side of our cooking/baking division of labor).  Since the pasta dough and all will end up being pretty integral to a lot of things I thought I'd start out by describing how we (and I mostly mean Lauren) go about making it.

We almost never make egg pasta, partially because we developed our expertise while experimenting with coffee pastas (where you need the coffee to form a large part of the liquid and thus don't use egg) but mostly because eggs aren't really necessary and add extra expense and ingredients to the pasta.  For the first year or so we rolled out the dough with an empty wine bottle, cut the sfoglia (the uncut flat sheet of pasta dough) with a knife and then rolled them out again (if doing linguine or filled pasta's) or pinched and rolled the pieces into pici (pici is a hand formed pasta from around Sienna that looks a bit like spaghetti the size of a dinner straw).  Dust the pasta lightly with flour and let it dry for a while, then cook.  Over the summer we got ourselves a little hand cranked pasta machine (a Marcato Atlas 150 if it matters) which dramatically speeds up the process of rolling out the sfoglias and cutting fettuccine or spaghetti (which is what it came with -- you can get other cutting dies but we haven't yet).  The hard bit is getting the cooking time just right -- start with 2 min. and experiment.  We've found that extra (more than 5 min.) drying time makes it easier to get decent al dente results.

Recipe

For each cup or so of flour (feeds 2) add about tablespoon of olive oil and around a 1/4 cup of water.  Kneed it together until the dough is smooth but not at all sticky.  Cover and let it rest for 10 min. or so, then roll it out and cut.  Dust it with flour and let it dry for between 15 min. and 2 hours.  Bring a large pot of water to boil, add salt (Italians, or at least Tuscans, add salt in extremely generous proportions to everything except bread and that certainly includes pasta water) and cook pasta for 2 min. or until it tastes done.