It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m at loose ends. The obvious choice is to go into the refrigerator and mess around with the variety of leftovers I find. In addition, I chose a quart container of broth, auspiciously labeled “Bean Water”, which I could use to reconstitute some mushrooms. Part of what I had to choose from came from activities a week or two ago in which I was making chestnut flour pasta. I found a small package of that flour in my pasta material, and even though it was probably twelve years old, the flour was perfectly good, surprisingly. I had made some dishes with fettuccine from that flour, and more recently, I made tonnarelli.

In the refrigerator today, I found the tonnarelli leftovers, which included a small amount of porcini mushrooms that had been reconstituted, and some beet greens as well. The bean water got used with a tablespoon of butter to boil two kinds of mushrooms, some oyster mushrooms, which had dried out a bit in the refrigerator, and some dried black trumpet mushrooms, which I had purchased a few years ago. Both of them soaked up the bean water with gusto, and when added to the leftover pasta, made an excellent lunch. To brighten the dish, I added some blanched chicory, a slightly bitter vegetable from Puglia which balanced the flavors, offsetting the richness of the chestnuts and mushrooms.

After considerable thought, I decided that the pasta dish was rich enough that it needed a fairly full-bodied Italian red wine. The selection was a Barbera del Sannio, one of Nick Mucci’s iconic wines from Campania. It was, indeed, the right choice.