#2 Pasta Putanesca

In the last year, I have learned through Top Chef how important Mise en Place is to a chef and after making the Silver Palate's Pasta Putanesca recipe I learned how important it is to the home cook. Mise En Place is the french word for preparing ingredients ahead of time. This dish is fast and very easy but to do it successfully I recommend doing all the Mise en Place before you put the oil in the pan. As soon as I got the ingredients home I was furiously cooking but what a mistake it was not to cut the anchovies, the olives, and the garlic first. Things were chaotic in the kitchen and made for a stressful dinner. I also made two other mistakes with this dish. First, I used diced tomatoes instead of the whole tomatoes called for in the recipe. I think the whole tomatoes would have provided more juice to the sauce and made it richer. The second mistake was I blindly grabbed a jar of olives and didn't notice they were pitted. There I was chopping the olive around the pit while the garlic was browning in the pan. What a pain.

#1 Linguine with Tomatoes and Basil

This is the recipe that actually prompted me to get on Amazon and finally buy the Silver Palate cookbook. I had heard about the cook book years ago and been interested in the easy, yet elegant recipes it promised. But is was an interview I had heard with the authors about this gooey brie dish that ended my procrastination and it was this dish that I made about two days after the book was in my hot little hands. I love Brie and pasta but I thought that eating an entire pound of brie and two pounds of pasta between just the two of us might be a little ridiculous. So, I invited some of our favorite dinner guests to a nice Sunday dinner and went shopping. This dish is a dream to make for guests. The only real work is cutting tomatoes and garlic. I have to confess that I didn't read the recipe thoroughly at first and it did come to a surprise to me that you didn't cook the sauce at all. But it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The warm pasta adds enough heat to melt the Brie but it is still cool enough to be refreshing and almost kind of light. (If you don't think about all the cheese you just ate). We had this with a Cameron Hughes Lot 58 Chardonay and some La Brea bread. I highly recommend this dish more summer dinner parties. You make the sauce a couple hours ahead of time so the flavors can meld then all you have to do is cook the pasta before your friends arrive. Although, I would recommend not letting this easy step allow you to lose your focus. I got distracted and let the linguine burn a little. Oops. Luckily, I made a lot and there was enough pasta left to serve. Overall, I think it was a success and I am looking forward to having another dinner party with this dish.

New Project

Recently, a younger cousin of mine excitedely mentioned that she had purchased the new Top Chef cook book and was discovering some great new dishes. I was inspired by her enthusiasm and thought I might buy it and cook as many of the recipes as I could. However, a couple of weeks before I bought the 25th Anniversary edition of the The Silver Palate and instead of splurging on yet another cook book I thought I might as well make as many of these recipes as I could and then move to another.

To make the cooking more interesting and to give me something fun to blog about I have designed a little challenge for myself. The blog-o-sphere is full of accounts of people making every recipe out of this or that great cook book. I know that I am not disciplined enough to actually make every recipe in any cook book so I thought I could try a scaled down version. To keep myself focused and manage my expectations, I intend to meet the following goals:

• I will make 12 recipes out of the cook book that I can serve as a main dish. Desserts and side dishes are just a bonus.
• I will make and blog about the recipes by September 30, 2008. I am writer and work well under a deadline.
• I will remake 5 of the dishes and serve them to guests by December 15, 2008. The Silver Palate ladies encourage their readers to make entertaining a habit. We often get in a rut of just going out with friends or spending our weekends holed away in the house. This part of my challenge will hopefully form some new healthy routines without exhausting us too much.

Now, this is the part where I cheat a little. I have already made three of these recipes and have served one to guests. I will blog about those in the next entries. So this officially starts my mid-year challenge.