Hello! Mia here, filling in for Melissa Clark today. How are you? I’m … tired. Maybe it’s the heat, maybe it’s just Monday, but I’m slow and sluggish, the human equivalent of that womp-womp trombone noise. I need a dinner that knows how bleh I am but also knows I’m hungry and want something substantial…
In John Guare’s play “Six Degrees of Separation,” there’s a scene in which a father asks a second-grade teacher, at parents’ night, why the art her students make is so especially brilliant. “Look at the first grade,” he says to her. Blotches of green and black. Look at the third grade. Camouflage. But the second…
In Melissa Clark’s “Dinner in One” cookbook — which is her collection of one-pot recipes, you’re welcome — Melissa shares that her family refers to pearl couscous as pasta bubbles. Pasta bubbles! Is there any better term for capturing the delightful chew and pleasingly spherical shape of this tiny pasta? (The “pasta bubbles” recipe, by…
My flight landed just before dinnertime last night. My family and I could easily have ordered in, but after four straight days of restaurant food — on a scouting trip for The New York Times — I craved the Zen of making dinner, which always soothes my travel frazzle. I wanted something fast, pantry-friendly and…
Tourists tend to flock to Macerata, a small hilltop city in the eastern part of the Marche region, for two reasons: The summer opera festival and the decidedly unsummery seven-layer baked pasta dish known as vincisgrassi. Letizia Carducci, one of the three siblings who have been running the 30-seat Osteria Dei Fiori, which opened in…
Agnolotti del plin has its own hazy back story. Centuries before the House of Savoy ruled the Kingdom of Italy, from 1861 to 1946, the dynasty controlled the Piedmont, starting in the 1600s. Bordering the Alps in the north, south and west, the region was, and remains, home to some of the peninsula’s richest and…
T’s May 19 Travel issue is dedicated to pasta in Italy, diving deep into the culinary traditions, regional variations and complicated history of the country’s national symbol. I (like you, I’m sure) have friends who don’t eat meat. I also have friends who don’t eat fish. Others don’t eat eggs. Then there are the ones…
Get out your gochujang: Alexa Weibel has a new shrimp pasta built around the Korean red chile paste, which gives the dish so much fiery richness and depth. To make sure that the tender bits of shrimp are evenly strewed throughout the pasta, Lex smartly chops them into bite-size pieces before cooking. Cherry tomatoes add…
Get out your gochujang: Alexa Weibel has a new shrimp pasta built around the Korean red chile paste, which gives the dish so much fiery richness and depth. To make sure that the tender bits of shrimp are evenly strewed throughout the pasta, Lex smartly chops them into bite-size pieces before cooking. Cherry tomatoes add…
Truth or myth: Pasta should always be cooked al dente or firm to the tooth. The source of this myth seems to be transcontinental confusion. The American way of serving fully cooked pasta with sauce dolloped on top is different from the Italian way of serving pasta and sauce combined. In Italian recipes, the pasta…
