Did Somebody Say “Gesundheit”? What’s cooking? Shakshuka with Goat Cheese and Broccoli Rabe

While working on this dish, I started thinking about how many cloves of garlic I’ve chopped in my life. Surely thousands. And yet I’m not significantly better at it than ever. Not like those chefs who ninja their garlic in nanoseconds and turn out perfectly even, teeny-tiny dice. I watched a video posted by one of my food blogger friends, and it was truly impressive. I’m not going to give you the link because it would make me look bad, and that’s not what this blog is for. This blog is for making me look GOOD.

On the other hand, I heard Ruth Reichl (former editor of Gourmet) speak not long ago about her new cookbook, and she says she’s never had a cooking lesson, so her knife skills are hopeless. My kind of woman.

So in the run-up to Thanksgiving, we all need to be conserving our strength for the Herculean tasks to come. And as usual, the Kitchen Goddess is working on a few nice side dishes for you that will make veggies the star of the show. But in the meantime,...

Shakshuka! Sounds like someone sneezed, doesn’t it? Instead, it’s a terrific dish for a Sunday night supper or when you just want something straightforward that doesn’t dirty a bunch of bowls/pans. Conceptually, it’s a lot like a frittata in the sense that you can pump it up with whatever veggies you’ve got on hand, add some cheese, change the herbs, toss in some olives, etc. And it’s quite good reheated the next day for lunch.

At its most basic, shakshuka (also spelled shakshouka) is a dish of eggs poached in tomato sauce with onions, peppers, paprika, and cumin. It’s a staple of North African cuisines – Libyan, Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, and Egyptian – where it’s often served for breakfast; but it’s sufficiently hearty, especially with the various additions, that it’s also served at the evening meal, especially in winter. According to Wikipedia (who else?), shakshuka is also popular in Israel, where it was introduced by Tunisian Jews who immigrated there in the 1950s; and it’s strikingly similar to the Turkish dish, menemen.

So here’s the version the Kitchen Goddess served this week. What I liked most about it is the way the sweetness of the caramelized onions and peppers balanced with the bitterness of the broccoli rabe and the goat cheese. And my hubby sneaked a second helping when I wasn’t looking. So try mine or see what’s in your fridge that’ll make it your own.

Kitchen Goddess note: Broccoli rabe – pronounced rahb – is a relatively bitter green, more popular in Italy than the U.S., but it has gained popularity over the last few years. Its use in France goes back to the 16th century. As you might expect, it’s packed with vitamins and cancer-fighting agents. It’s also a good source of protein, and one of the best sources of vitamin K, which protects against osteoporosis. 

This is a “saucy” dish, so you’ll want to serve it with something to sop up the juices – a crusty sourdough, pita, and naan all come to mind. It’s a one-dish meal, so you won’t need anything else.

Shakshuka with Goat Cheese and Broccoli Rabe

Adapted from Melissa Clark in The New York Times.

Serves 4.

Ingredients

Broccoli rabe

1 bunch broccoli rabe (also known as rapini)
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 large red bell pepper, halved, seeded, and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1-2 teaspoons minced garlic
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon sweet paprika (option: smoky paprika or a combination)
½ teaspoon Aleppo pepper (or ⅛ teaspoon cayenne pepper)
1 28-ounce can of whole plum tomatoes, with juice, coarsely chopped [Kitchen Goddess note: You can chop the tomatoes before adding them to the skillet, or add them to the skillet and chop them there, or use a potato masher on them. Or buy canned chopped tomatoes. The KG likes her tomatoes to be less uniformly chopped, but then you knew she would.]
4 ounces fresh goat cheese, crumbled
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
6 large eggs
Optional garnishes: chopped Italian parsley and chopped cilantro, hot sauce

Mise en place -- this recipe is a lot easier if you have everything ready.

Directions
Bring a pot of well-salted water to a boil and drop in your broccoli rabe for 5 minutes. Drain it well and chop it into pieces about an inch long. Reserve.

Preheat the oven to 375º.

Put a large, oven-proof skillet over medium/medium-low heat and add the olive oil. Add the onion and bell pepper and cook, stirring frequently, about 15 minutes. You want the vegetables to soften, and for the onions to get golden, not brown. Stir in the tomato paste and the garlic, and continue to cook, stirring, another minute. Add the cumin, paprika, and Aleppo pepper, and continue to cook, stirring, another minute.

Stir in the chopped tomatoes with their juices. Simmer the mixture for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until tomatoes have thickened. Add the crumbled goat cheese and stir. (It’s okay if the goat cheese isn’t thoroughly mixed. Mix it as much as you’d like.) Taste the sauce for seasoning.

With a spoon, hollow out a small area in the sauce, about an inch from the edge of the skilllet, and crack an egg into it. Do the same with the remaining eggs, spacing the eggs evenly around the skillet. Season the eggs lightly with salt and pepper.

Transfer the skillet to the oven and cook at 375º for 7-9 minutes, depending on how runny you like your eggs. Sprinkle with parsley and cilantro.

Oops! I forgot the parsley and cilantro. Ah, well...

Serve with hot sauce and some type of bread. The Kitchen Goddess recommends crusty sourdough, naan, or other flatbread.

Hero Worship, and I Don’t Mean Sandwiches What’s cooking? Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce with Spinach and Mushrooms

The Kitchen Goddess before... well, just before.

Aside from my grandmother, my first hero was Davy Crockett. Brave, principled, and handsome – assuming of course that he actually looked like Fess Parker. I was 8 years old in this photo, and thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

I moved on – wrestling bears and fighting wars not being my thing – to Nancy Drew, whose strength was more mental than physical, followed by Perry Mason, Holly Golightly, and eventually working my way to actual people: Anna Quindlen, Anne Lamott, and Nora Ephron. And while I developed an interest in cooking once I began living on my own, it wasn’t until my children were firmly into adolescence that I began elevating cooks like Julia Child and Ruth Reichl to rock star status.

Except on TV, I never got to see Julia in person; but Reichl is still actively cooking and writing, and she recently showed up in Austin to promote her latest book, My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life.

She’s as delightful in person as she appears to be in her memoirs (Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires) – funny, relaxed, thoughtful, and completely unpretentious. In a charming profile last September, New York Times writer Kim Severson notes that Reichl has never been to culinary school, so her knife skills are “ridiculously bad.” That fact alone endears her to me.

“I love the physical act of cooking,” Reichl says. “There are all these little secret moments in the kitchen, and if you don’t pay attention to that, you’re missing so much in life.” I get that philosophy. Think about the moment when an egg white goes from clear and gelatinous to creamy white and solid; the intricate structure of an orange segment, with all those little sacks of juice held together by threads; the satiny smooth, jewel-toned skin on an eggplant that’s so alluring I want to buy one even though it’s the only food I actively dislike.

In the Q&A part of the evening, someone asked Reichl’s favorite recipe. “Marcella Hazan’s Tomato Sauce,” she said without a moment’s hesitation. Then she proceeded to recite the recipe. This’ll take all night, I thought. And then it was done. Four ingredients. I was so amazed, I almost forgot to write them down. But I needn’t have worried – apparently this tomato sauce is legendary.

So I made some. And then, because I am, after all, the Kitchen Goddess, I played with it. Not the actual sauce – which by the way is insanely easy (total time = 1 hour) and extremely tasty with a lovely, rich tomato flavor – but the presentation. I wanted protein and I wanted something green, so I sautéed some mushrooms and bacon with some spinach, piled the whole thing on top of some pappardelle (½-inch wide flat noodles) with Marcella’s sauce, and presto! Dinner!! Yummmm...

Maybe I’m the only cook in the world who hasn’t already made this stuff. Maybe you’ve heard about it but were waiting for the Kitchen Goddess’s seal of approval. Wait no more. One batch will easily feed 4-6, with a pound of pasta. Serve it plain for lunch, with shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano and freshly ground black pepper. Or gussy it up like the KG did with bacon, mushrooms, and spinach before you add the shavings of Parm.

Kitchen Goddess note on tomatoes: Marcella apparently called for 2 pounds of fresh tomatoes (skinned and cut into coarse pieces) or 2 cups of canned whole tomatoes. Now, you may be shocked to hear this, but the KG has other things to do with her time than skin tomatoes, especially when the canned variety are a reasonable substitute. And while many food writers – including those at The New York Times – will swear by San Marzano canned tomatoes, the tasters at Cook’s Illustrated claim that Muir Glen Organic Whole Peeled Tomatoes is the very best tasting brand, followed by Hunt’s Whole Plum Tomatoes, followed by Cento San Marzano Certified Peeled Tomatoes. Armed with this information, the KG nevertheless went with the San Marzano tomatoes. Call me a traditionalist. You should use your own judgment. The important news is that a full 28-ounce can is a perfectly acceptable substitute for the 2 cups, even though it’s closer to 3 cups. The quantities listed below are what the KG used, with outstanding results. Which just goes to show there’s more than one way to skin a cat, er, tomato.

Marcella Hazan’s Classic Tomato Sauce

Adapted from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)

Ingredients
1 medium onion (about 4 ounces), sliced in half through the root
1 28-ounce can San Marzano whole tomatoes, including juices
5 tablespoons unsalted butter
pinch of kosher salt

Preparation
In a large saucepan over medium heat, combine all ingredients. Bring the mixture to a simmer and cook uncovered for 45 minutes. Stir occasionally with a wooden spoon, using the spoon to mash any chunks of tomato.

Remove the onion before using the sauce. (Eat it or toss it -- there are schools of thought for both options.) Sauce can be tossed with pasta or ladled on top. You should have enough sauce to accommodate one pound of pasta.

Pasta with Tomato Sauce, Spinach, and Mushrooms

Serves 2.

Ingredients
1 recipe Classic Tomato Sauce
6 ounces pasta (your choice -- KG prefers either a wide flat noodle like pappardelle, or a shaped pasta such as fusilli or farfalle)
3 slices bacon, cut in 1-inch pieces
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
8 ounces crimini mushrooms, quartered
10 ounces fresh spinach
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

KG note: If you’ve already made the tomato sauce, the rest of this dish shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes. If you haven't made the tomato sauce, finish reading then go back up to that recipe and get it done!

Preparation
Remove bacon from the fridge 5-10 minutes before frying.

Start the pasta now, cooking according to package instructions. While you're waiting for the pasta water to boil,...

In a large skillet with a lid, cook the bacon (uncovered) over medium heat until crisp. [KG note: To keep bacon from scorching, always start it in a cold skillet.] Remove the cooked bacon to paper towels to drain, and pour off all but 1 tablespoon of the fat.

Add the butter to the pan, and turn the heat to medium-high. Once the butter foam has subsided, add the mushrooms, stirring rapidly for 4-5 minutes. The mushrooms will at first absorb all the fat, then eventually will begin to release it as the mushrooms brown. Once they’ve begun to brown, add the spinach and stir, lifting leaves from the bottom of the pan and turning them to distribute the fat throughout. Reduce the heat to medium, cover the pan, and cook 5 minutes. Test the spinach for doneness at the end of 5 minutes, and turn off the heat. (If you want the spinach to be a little more done, just leave the lid on the pan for a couple more minutes. It’s important not to overcook the spinach.) Season to taste with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.

You can serve the dish in layers as I’ve done here – pasta then tomato sauce then mushrooms and spinach – or you can add the pasta and tomato sauce to the skillet and stir together over low heat until the mixture is evenly warm. In either case, garnish with shaved or grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and the cooked bacon.

Tip-toeing through My Magazines What’s cooking? Rigatoni with Abruzzi-Style Lamb Sauce

I spent a few days last week going through a recent issue of Food & Wine magazine. Okay, so it wasn’t really a recent issue. It was the March 2013 issue, and I was just getting around to it. I do this sort of thing with my subscription to The New Yorker, too – I figure the articles are interesting and informative and they’ll still be that way in another six months. Although occasionally I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon I saw several years ago that pictured a man in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, saying to the receptionist, “I see by your copy of Newsweek that Lyndon Johnson has decided not to run for reelection.”

In any case, in the issue in question, the magazine was celebrating their 35th anniversary, and reprinting many of their favorite recipes from over the years. The cynic in me – oh, yes, I have one – suspects they did the same exercise on their 30th anniversary, and the 25th, and..., and maybe we’ll see it again for the 40th. But I haven’t been a subscriber that long, so the recipes were all new to me, and by the time I’d waded through the whole issue, I found that I’d earmarked at least a dozen. I got so excited, I called friends who live nearby and invited them for dinner the next night. (One of the best things about retirement is that you don’t have to wait until you can get a babysitter or it’s not a school night to entertain.)

Something about all this cold weather makes me want to be in Italy. I’m pretty sure it gets cold there, but you know they have all that red wine and pasta... We had a brief taste of spring in Texas last week, but it’s all of a sudden feeling like winter here again. And more snow for New Jersey yesterday morning. (Can’t those people get a break, for goodness sake?)

So one of the dishes that called out to me was a pasta dish from Marcella Hazan, featuring lamb in the sauce. Now, when you read a recipe in a magazine, you never really know if it’s exactly as the celebrity chef meant it to be, or if the magazine staff tweaked it in ways that didn’t help. For whatever reason – and no disrespect to Marcella – this recipe didn’t blow any of us away. But it had a good premise, so I played with it and last night made it again, just for my husband and me. I added garlic – imagine a recipe with lamb that doesn’t have garlic! – and some bacon for extra flavor, a zucchini for color and vegetation, and I cut the pasta way back to give the sauce room to stand out. We pronounced it quite good, and easy as well. In fact, there’s not much to do other than a lot of chopping. I served it with ciabatta bread, sliced and toasted with garlic butter, and steamed asparagus drizzled with an Italian vinaigrette. Just the thing for a cold evening.

For you winos out there, we paired the dish with a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo.

Rigatoni with Abruzzi-Style Lamb Sauce

Based on a recipe by Marcella Hazan published in Food & Wine Magazine, March 2013

Serves 4-6.

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
¼ cup chopped onion
1 large clove garlic (about 2 teaspoons), minced
2 ounces thinly sliced pancetta, finely chopped
1 ounce bacon, cut in ¼-inch dice
1 heaping tablespoon chopped rosemary
8-10 ounces boneless lamb, cut into ½-inch dice
Kosher salt
Freshly ground pepper
½ cup dry white wine
One 28-ounce can Italian plum tomatoes, with their juices
1 small zucchini, cut in ½-inch dice
12 ounces rigatoni pasta
⅓ cup freshly grated Pecorino Romano cheese or Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus more for serving

The best flavor comes when the pieces of lamb are no larger than 1/2 inch.

In a large skillet over medium heat, sauté the onion in the oil, stirring frequently, until the onion is a pale gold (about 4 minutes). Add the garlic and continue to stir frequently for another minute. Add the pancetta, bacon, and rosemary and cook, stirring occasionally, until the fat from the pancetta and the bacon is rendered (the meat will still be soft).

Raise the heat slightly, add the lamb, and cook until browned, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and stir. Add the wine and simmer about 10 minutes, until it evaporates. Add the tomatoes and the zucchini and simmer, stirring occasionally and reducing the heat if necessary, for about 20 minutes until the fat begins to separate from the sauce.

At the end of cooking, you'll see little pools of oil sitting atop the sauce, especially around the edge of the pan.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in a large pot of rapidly boiling water (4 quarts) with 1½ tablespoons of salt. Stir often until the pasta is al dente.

Drain the pasta and immediately transfer it to a large warmed bowl. Toss with the lamb sauce and the ⅓ cup of grated cheese. Serve immediately, passing additional cheese at the table.

Mangia!