Homemade pasta sauces, your favorites

You are?





Don't think there's such a creature as "clam juice" available on my supermarket shelves. A pity. The juice from clams - of the imported, mainly tinned variety - can be a bit salty. Say nothing of having tiny bits of grit in it! Aghhh!

Never mind. Do continue.

I'm not so sure they go together... perhaps you can ask the chef next time...


wanders off.... remember a story with a friend and a motorcycle and Sambuca... no, I wasn't there, so it's hard to repeat. Fill in story to fit...

chef and restaurant are 2000 miles away, and may not have survived the condofication of the neighborhood that was starting when we left town.

I guess that means I'll have to play. I have bread, I have milk, I have marsala...

Honestly, I wouldn't have been surprised if the mix had a teaspoon of Jagermeister in it.

Jager goes well with no food....

I dunno, I've seen no food with Jager go very, very badly.

Touche' (says Ralph)

or a similar amaro... I just happen to have some fratelli Averna in the cabinet.
Ok, ok, I'll fool with it, after a bit of research.

You can use Marsala wine and rum, osso. Amaretto might not be
too good of a combination with the Marsala.

Jaegermeister? Oy, that's a fatal drink.

So are several sicilian amari...





Well, I must rest now, to think about this.







There was a friend of a friend who used to drink too much Frenet Branca...

Perhaps domani, we'll return to pasta...

About the accepted definition of "sauce" for pasta: can this include super quick, super simple ones, too?

There is a red clam sauce version ,of . Im not a big fan of it since its essentially a marinara with clams. Lou's recipe was tailor made to enhance clam flavor. A thing I should have mentioned is that canned clams are a poor but probably last resort version for the sauce. They really grind em before they can them so the sauce is more like hamburger meat with a salty somewaht vapid clam taste.


I had a terrific Fettucine Carbonara at a restaurant in Miton Delaware when we went down to my wifes sister's summer house. Were going down there again in JAn to do some sketching of the oyster fishermen and I wanna see how that is mad. Carbonara, as I understand it, is a bacon and ham flavor that is in a garlic creamy sauce(sortof a prima vera sauce).

We had a recipe for a pasta dish called "chicken scaparella(or maybe its scaparello)" It had chicken thighs, italian sausage chunks ((about 2" is fine for the recipe, not much longer). The whole thing had pitted dark olives, garlic, pepperoncini, basil and in a stock sauce.
Its a really satisfying sauce served over a thicker spaghetti.(Even kluski works in a pinch).

Weve lost the recipe but we wing it I know Im missing some steps and ingredients . Id like to have the recipe , it came from the PBS Italian cooking show with the South Philly lady chef. Grrrrr

Do you mean Lidia's Table?

no more zuchinnis please
Garlic bread is such a delicious and simple food to make. It amazes me what some restaurants try to pass off as bread, or garlic bread. Some people at work rave about this chain restaurant we have in Michigan. Olive garden. I dislike it.. I can eat fresh garlic bread with a nice salad for dinner any day. I love Michigans seasons, but , I can only have a garden for four months. Speaking of gardens, A pre dinner food we do is to have all the fresh vegetables from are garden sliced on the table, with fresh cold cuts (oldani, mortadella, ....) fresh bread, slow cooked hungarian peppers, homemade hummus and tabouli and of course a bottle of filippio berio,The number of half sandwich combinations is endless. If the bread doesn't hurt the roof of your mouth, your not taking a big enough bite.

Olive Garden, shudder.....
and what's oldani?


Msolga, sure, quick sauces are fine for here... I was just trying to keep the thread to sauce made at home and not just poured from a glass jar or can.
But, even those would be ok, given that we've tangented all around already.


Farmer, every dish you've been describing sounds good..
Thick pasta? One I don't like so much but kept ordering in italy because I learn slowly at best... is perciatelli, kind of a spaghetti length pasta that is tubular like macaroni..

I've never cooked a carbonara. <puts on list>

Meantime, this morning while dawdling about I opened one of my old Hazan books to just any page and found some recipes for sfinciuni - not pasta but a two layered and stuffed pizza from Palermo. Gads, a woman's* work is just never done....


*Not to be sexist, that was the old phrase.

Hmmm, if it is from one of Lidia Bastanich's books (don't know how many she has, just know a friend really likes one), Farmer, maybe you could look at Amazon and check the contents of her book or books and see if the recipe is in one of them.. Or maybe the tv show has recipe pages at the website..

pdawg - are you still in Madison? there are some serious foodies there. They're often posting about the latest cheap/cheerful/wonderful food sources over at Fine Cooking/CooksTalk. There has been at least one CT get-together there.

You should be able to find a good source for EVOO/cold-pressed OO there.





(trying to remember the name of the food shop/cooking school one of the posters started working at in the fall)

spelled with an o, pronounced like an a pronounced aldanni
The oldani(sp?), I was reffering to is a salami. Usually two to two and a half inches in diameter
Tonight I'm attempting a caper and sage sauce for some whitefish. If it suceeds, I will share. The recipe, not the leftovers.