#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.