Dgourmac's Blog

It’s hard to beat homemade pasta. I’ve been enjoying making Tonarelli at home. Last week I decided to adjust the recipe in an effort to make the dough more supple. This formula is the best so far:

• 88 grams of double-zero “00” flour
• 37 grams of Durum wheat (milled myself from wheat berries)
• 1 extra-large whole egg
• 1 egg yolk
• salt
• olive oil

Onions, mushrooms, zucchini, yellow squash, tomato, and leeks, sautéed individually, became the sauce.

This Aglianico was a very good match with the dish.

Pasta or Couscous? No problem. The next dinner features an excellent couscous that was a gift from a good friend. The couscous is superb and took less than 10 minutes to cook. I grilled a bunch of my favorite vegetables plus some pitted Kalamata olives, and I added them to the couscous, along with a not-spicy Harissa, and it was all delicious.

Conclusion: pasta and couscous each provides a neutral palette for painting beautiful meals. Select the best of each, and have fun putting it all together.

This marvelous pasta dish started for me with a large batch of home-grown Spring arugula that was beginning to go to seed. I pulled off all the good leaves, washed and dried them, and saved them for something I could make that looked appealing.

Enter this recipe from NYT Cooking:

I made a few minor adjustments: frozen corn from last year’s harvest, less butter, no red-pepper flakes, and added green garlic and scallions. It was easy to prepare, quick to cook, and delicious to eat. The wine was a bottle of California 2020 Vermentino from Birichino, my favorite new winery on the Left Coast. This was part of their 6-pack Spring shipment. If my math is right, the two barrels produced totaled only 600 bottles. I was very happy to have one of them.

This pasta dish will definitely be part of my regular repertoire.

I’m never quite sure what to do with Spring Onions, those smallish onions that look like large scallions with bigger bulbs. I do like the brightness of the flavors, and this past year, I actually grew some of them in my little herb garden. Here’s a good description of how to take an onion which has been too long in your onion basket and has started to sprout:

Here’s what they look like in my herb garden today:

A few days ago I pulled up three of these onions, and I cleaned them and cut them into green sections and bulbs. They sat in the refrigerator until last night, when I decided to try a new recipe with them, using the sea scallops from my weekly Vermont-based provisioner — Farmers to You.

Neither of us likes Tarragon, so as I adapted the recipe to our tastes — rice milk, less flour, cream instead of crème fraiche — I substituted fresh lemon thyme for tarragon. For accompaniment I made some mixed rices and freshly-delivered Swiss Chard leaves, cooked with chopped garlic. The results were terrific.

No, that’s not the name of a new Italian sports car. It’s actually a member of the Broccoli family, but it looks more like Kale, and I just learned how to cook it properly.

Like many of my favorite greens from the South of Italy, this vegetable takes kindly to bold flavors. I found a superb recipe by Mark Peel, chef-owner of Campanile restaurant in Los Angeles.

I decided to make it for lunch today, pairing it with some leftover grilled Spanish Mackerel, coated with a Blackened Fish spice mixture. A drizzle of fresh lemon juice on the fish, a plate of cooked Spigarello, and a glass of white wine from Liguria, and all was right with the world for at least two hours.