Luke and I got home from the honeymoon last week. Thanks to Fergi we came home with several bottle of nice Italian wine and a bunch of Italian spices. Well after being spoiled for two weeks with great food and great wine, we were missing it by our first weekend back. So we cracked open The Silver Spoon again and started trying to re-create the great food we had in Italy. We also just happened to have a lot of fresh roma tomatoes from our garden to use in these recipes. So first up, we decided to try Penne Arrabbiata. Mainly because it requires a bunch of tomatoes and we could use our new arrabbiata spices. It turned out delicious and before the night had ended we were already scheming our next meal. Some notes from Penne Arrabbiata:
Penne Arrabbiata (pg. 295) – Penne All’Arrabbiata
Some of the spices that we threw in early before the garlic had browned burned. Next time we should just throw them in right before you add the tomatoes. The recipe called for garlic cloves to be added to the oil and removed once they were browned. Luke and I love garlic so a lot of times we like to load up a dish with garlic, whether it’s minced, powder or even sliced garlic cloves. This was new for us to not add lots of garlic, but by just browning the garlic in the oil, the garlic flavor came through without overloading the dish with the garlic flavor.
So after success with the Penne Arrabbiata, we decided that we couldn’t wait to cook again, so two days later we were looking through the cookbook and saw Spaghetti with Zucchini. While we were gone our zucchini plant decided to sprout a few insanely large zucchinis. What quantifies insanely large you might ask? How about 18″ inches or so long and around 4″ in diameter. Actually, when we came home we thought that our friends Ryan & Melissa didn’t pick the zucchini that had begun to grow when we left for the honeymoon. But we found out that while we were gone the plant had sprouted 3 huge zucchinis they had picked and the one we found when we got back was the 4th. We picked that zucchini on a Monday night and by Friday, another one even larger had grown in its place. So we decided that Spaghetti with Zucchini would be a great new recipe to try.
Spaghetti with Zucchini (pg. 303) – Spaghetti con le Zucchine
The recipe calls for mozzarella, so I assumed that to be authentic they must mean fresh mozzarella. We cook the sauce which is a combination of tomatoes, oil and zucchini. Once the spaghetti is cooked you are supposed to add in diced mozzarella and shredded parmesan. We add them to the pot and before we can stir, the mozzarella starts to clump. We try to let it melt more so that it might stir in and adhere to the noodles better but after mutliple attempts and 10 or so minutes going by, we think this is the best we can get. We decided that we should try plain old shredded mozzarella next time. I checked elsewhere in the book to see if they had any instructions on this, but they didn’t. (note: we tried a different recipe that called for diced mozzarella a few days later and the shredded mozzarella worked perfectly).
Grilled Zucchini:
Since we’re talking about zucchini, I thought it only appropriate that I share a recipe that my co-worker Scott provided to me. You slice up the zucchini into strips. You coat the zucchini slices with olive oil, salt and pepper. And then you grill to “perfection” (per Luke).
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