Mumbo Jumbo

I'm playing peek-a-boo with a mouse right now, so I apologize in advance if this post is a bit mumble-jumbled. Damn baby mouse. This dish has quite a bit behind it in scattered ideas though, so I suppose it's not fair to pin it all on the mouse. I really should just shout out random things and hope they link themselves together on their own. Alas. 

I made pasta for dinner a few nights ago, mostly to prove to myself I can make pasta, but also to try to convince myself that I actually like pasta. And I do...kind of.While I can use my lack of Italian origins to back-up my non-preference for it (wasn't a huge fan of Italian food growing up, but maybe that's because everything I knew of Italian food stemmed from Olive Garden's. And let's face it, you remember the bread-sticks at Olive Garden, not the pasta), I should just come clean. Pasta dishes and I don't jive so well. And as I've grown older, while I've come to appreciate other fine Italian foods more and more - hard and soft cheeses, aged meats, pizza in all its forms, all good things - I still have yet to accept pasta fully into my life. Unless it's layered into a lasagna or wrapped around some luscious ricotta cheese, I'm not a fan, and even then, I've got my qualms. In fact, I can count on my fingers the number of times I've enjoyed a pasta dish (besides the lasagna and manicotti exceptions noted above). One, when I had some wild mushroom gnocchi in Berlin, and two, when Pinky and I had some creamy mushroom parpadelle at Dave and Julie's (our mutual friends). All of these things, even Dave and Julie, are memories so far in the past that they are no more. 

It makes no sense to me why I don't like pasta. It's a noodle, and I certainly like Asian noodles of all forms and types. I like tomato-based and cream-based sauces, so that's not the issue. It's also certainly not a matter of quality; I've had dried pasta straight from Italy (one of my co-workers was from Italy and she often brought back dried pasta from the shores of her hometown for me). It was okay. What is it about Italian pasta that doesn't work for me?

Perhaps this aversion just comes from having sat before so many unappetizing pasta dishes in the past. In fact, very rarely have I ever had pasta "done right." I know some people might scoff and say that's "not possible, pasta's the easiest thing in the world to prepare!" Completely disagree.  I think pasta is difficult to prepare correctly because it's so easy to mask messed-up pasta under a lot of sauce and cheese, to explain away any mushiness. Pasta is a very forgiving medium. You can tuck it away under so many other things, but this trait that makes it so versatile also works against it. Passable pastas are rampant in the world, so methinks I'm not ragging on pasta necessarily, but rather, the rampant abuse of proper pasta preparation. 

Speaking of things past and rampant abuse, I'd like to make a small comment here on ramps. Ramps, it seems, are the new food craze. I'm quite curious about them myself. What are these wild mountain onions that reek so much so, that festivals are thrown in their honor all over Virginia? Pinky and I were so curious about them that we were actually planning on going to a ramp festival (they occur sometime in April) this year, until we did some internet research and discovered this factoid. Ramps are being rampantly abused. Hah hah, that was so worth it. 

Now, of course, you have to take everything you read on the internet with a grain of salt, but we ended up deciding not to go to a festival for conservation reasons. Apparently, ramps take nearly 12 years to become harvest-worthy, and they're being pulled up faster than they're being replaced. With all the new demands, there's concern that they don't stand a chance. 

What's pictured in this post is another matter entirely. While walking in the park with the dog, I gleefully stumbled across a field of wild onions. It was like a blast from the happy parts of my childhood. My mother would often pull the wild onions growing awry among the flowers of the garden in the spring, and stir-fry them with eggs. Lo and behold, they're growing awry all over the dog park. I haven't been that excited in awhile, but when I realized that I was walking through a field of wild onions, I quickly hunched over and began to pull them up, all the while cackling like a loon. I was so giddy I probably even scared the dog away with all the excess energy. At the time, I wasn't 100% sure if they were truly wild onions (let's face it, my knowledge of edible plants is limited so if it wasn't for the onion-y smell I probably would've missed them), but Pinky bit into one and seemed to survive just fine. We were pulling them up freely when we both suddenly stopped and wondered if wild onions were suffering the same fate as ramps. 

Fortunately, wild onions do not have these restrictions. Still though, the thought was sobering and we slowed our harvest. We certainly had enough stalks for one meal, and these little suckers were so ripe that even though we carried them wrapped in a bag tucked away deep in a sleeve, we could smell them. The whole the car reeked of onions on the drive home.  

And so, to wrap it up, in a concerted attempt to enjoy these wild onions, and to identify why I couldn't jump on the pasta rah rah! band-wagon that people all seem to be on, I decided to try and make some fresh pasta at home with an accompanying sauce. I was gliding on the hope that fresh pasta would taste better than dried pasta, as is often the case (fresh is better than not fresh). After picking up some semolina flour from the local co-op, I got to work. Extensively long story short, really, I made parpadelle pasta to complement some garlicky wild onions I pulled up in the park with Pinky. Mumble-jumbled indeed.

Parpadelle Pasta with a Mushroom, Bacon and Wild Onion Cream Sauce 

2 servings

4 strips thick-cut bacon

1 small onion, diced fine

8 oz. baby bella mushrooms, sliced thin

5 cloves of garlic, minced

15 stalks wild onions, diced fine

1 C whole milk

1 C grated Parmesan

salt and pepper

~1 lb parpadelle pasta (recipe given below)

Dice the bacon into small pieces, then brown in a large pan on medium-high heat, until fat has rendered and bacon has crisped up a bit. Remove bacon pieces from the pan and reserve on a paper towel, to sop up excess fat. Also pour out some of the fat in the pan, leaving about 1 tablespoon in the pan for cooking. Lower flame to medium-low heat.

Add diced onion, garlic, and baby bella mushrooms to the pan with the 1 tablespoon of bacon grease. Cook low and slow until onions and mushrooms begin to brown and caramelize. Once that happens, add the bacon pieces back into the pan and pour in the milk. Simmer on low heat until the sauce thickens up a bit.

It is at this point that you should boil your pasta. I am now going to interject the recipe for the actual pasta itself right here. If you have some dried noodles on hand, this dish will be even faster. If you are preparing the pasta fresh, hopefully you made the pasta a few hours before you started this sauce. Anyways, here we go with the pasta (I'll come back to the cream sauce in a bit).

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Parpadelle interlude!

Parpadelle
Courtesy of Michael Chiarello
4 servings

1 3/4 C all-purpose flour
1 C semolina flour
6 large eggs, room temperature
1 TB olive oil
pinch of salt

Sift together the flours and salt, and mound it all together on a cutting board or large surface. Mix together the eggs and olive oil. Make a well in the mound of flour and slowly pour your eggs into the mound, stirring with a fork as you go. Do this in increments. It's a lot of egg and there might be overflow, so make sure you're working on a very large surface and you have your pastry scraper available to bring the errant eggs back to the fold.

Once a sticky dough is formed, knead the dough until the pasta becomes soft and elastic. Split the dough into two parts, and wrap each part in plastic. Let the dough sit in the fridge for at least an hour (overnight is better).

Once the pasta dough has rested, remove it from the fridge and turn out onto a well-floured surface. You are now going to prepare the pasta. If you have a pasta dough roller, feel free to use that. I don't have one, so I split the dough into 4 parts and rolled out each part into the shape of a rectangle, using a rolling pin, and then sliced the rolled out dough length-wise (to form wide noodles). If you're doing this by rolling pin, you'll want to roll out the dough until it is very very thin (you should be able to kind of see your fingers behind it). Once it is rolled out, slice into strips and hang to dry for at least 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, your pasta is ready to be dropped into some boiling water (it does not take long to cook so keep an eye on it).  Okay, pasta recipe given. Let's get back to the original dish.

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While the sauce is simmering, boil your pasta (1/2 the recipe below): boil a pot of salted water and drop the fresh pasta into the boiling water. Do not overcook the pasta, and do not rinse the pasta when it is finished cooking. You can use some of the pasta water to the final sauce. This will help the sauce stick to the noodles. When the pasta is almost ready, add the diced wild onions and sprinkle parmesan cheese into the sauce. Don't add all the cheese at once or you might spend some time working out the clumps. Once the sauce is thick, add the pasta to the sauce and toss lightly until noodles are all coated. Add pasta water if sauce is too thick. Salt and pepper to taste, then serve.