Snowy Night Pasta Puttanesca

Plus: Boundary Bay Brewing Co., Gruyère Gougères for New Year's Eve, and Christmas Loot.

Dec 27, 2021

Greetings from Bellingham, Washington!

Craig and I were supposed to be back on a plane to L.A. today but, as it happens, it snowed and snowed on Christmas Day (a beautiful experience), then it was 11 degrees yesterday, and our flight this morning was cancelled. I’m actually relieved because our flight was scheduled today for 6:45 AM and we brought Winston with us, so the idea of sitting in the airport with our drugged out doggie with our flight getting delayed and delayed sounded like a nightmare. Instead, he gets to frolic in the snow.

Adam Roberts @amateurgourmet

Winston’s first snow and faceplant. 🐶❄️

Thankfully, we’re staying at the best AirBnB in the Pacific Northwest: Craig’s parents’ house. Steve and Julee are the consummate hosts: warm scones and raspberry jam for breakfast one day, waffles and bacon the next (with fresh maple syrup from a friend in Vermont). Dinners feature everything from homemade enchiladas one night, to crab cakes with freshly caught and frozen Dungeness crab (here’s Steve’s famous recipe).

Last night, in order to show my gratitude, I whipped up a spaghetti puttanesca for six, including us, Craig’s parents, and Craig’s sister and her beau, Dean. It’s a simple recipe, but a crowd-pleaser because of all the garlic, anchovies, capers, and red chili flakes I put in there.

Recipe: Snowy Night Pasta Puttanesca

The trick to this pasta dish, as with all of the best pasta dishes, is to cook the sauce in one big pot and the spaghetti in another big pot, so that there’s lots of room for the spaghetti to swim around and not stick together as it cooks, and then plenty of room to stir it directly into the sauce for the final minute or two of cooking so that it absorbs all of the flavor.

My strategy here is to cook the sauce until it’s tight: it looks a little too thick, but then you thin it out with pasta water. That ensures that the sauce sticks to the pasta as opposed to a watery sauce that slips right off. Feel free to be bold with the flavors here: no one’s ever said, “This puttanesca’s too flavorful!” (Puttanesca itself refers to Italian prostitutes during World War II; while many think that this is the dish they made between clients, Thrillist says the reference is more likely aroma-related: “the powerful mix of anchovies, olives, and capers might have something in common with the scent of a mid-century Italian prostitute.” Yum!)

Makes enough for 6

Ingredients:

1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 red onion, chopped
Kosher salt
6 cloves of garlic, sliced
6 oil-packed anchovies
1/2 cup tomato paste
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
2 28-ounce cans whole San Marzano tomatoes, crushed by hand in a large bowl (careful not to squirt yourself)
1 tablespoon (or more) of capers, depending on how much you like them
1 1/2 pounds spaghetti (that’s 1 1/2 boxes; you can use 2 pounds, but it won’t be as saucy)
Freshly grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese

Instructions:

In a large pot or Dutch oven, heat the olive oil on medium-high heat. Add the onion and a pinch of kosher salt and cook for a minute or two until starting to turn translucent.
Push the onion to the side, add the garlic to one spot, the anchovies to another spot, and the tomato paste to another spot. Your goal is to toast these all a bit separately before stirring them all together, about a minute, stirring each section as it goes, just until the garlic starts to turn golden. Add the crushed red pepper, stir everything together, then add the tomatoes plus a teaspoon of salt. Bring to a boil, lower to an active simmer, and cook for at least 30 minutes until the sauce is very thick. Towards the end, stir in the capers, and taste. It may need a little salt, but probably not because of the anchovies.
Meanwhile, fill another large pot or Dutch oven with cold water, bring to a boil, season with salt so that the water tastes like a gentle broth that you’d enjoy eating (not salty like the ocean). Add the spaghetti, stir around with tongs, and cook two minutes less than the package directions.
To finish: use the tongs to fish the very al dente spaghetti out of the pot, add it to the sauce along with a ladleful of pasta water. Turn the heat under the sauce pot to high and cook, swirling all of the pasta around as you go, adding more pasta water if it’s too thick, until the pasta’s fully cooked, the sauce is clinging to it, and there’s no liquid at the bottom of the pan when you push everything aside.
Twirl the pasta into warmed bowls and sprinkle lots of cheese on top. Serve right away with more crushed pepper flakes and cheese on the side.

Know somebody who’d love this recipe as much as Kristin and Dean do? Share it below!

Before the snow hit, Craig and I wanted to have a night out in Bellingham and we asked his sister where to go. There were a few fancy options (I looked at their menus and they felt like places that we have in L.A.) and then she texted, “For the true Bellingham experience, go to a brewery that has really good food, like Aslan or Twin Sisters or Boundary Bay.” That sounded perfect to me and Craig.

Craig’s not a beer guy (“it reminds me too much of trying to be straight,” he said when I asked him why he didn’t like beer), but I enjoy it now and again. Boundary Bay had a huge selection; I settled on the Zen & Now Hazy IPA, with its “ethereal hazy orange tone and creamy white head.”

It was almost like wine in its complexity; funky, citrusy, light but with real depth to it.

I loved the food at Boundary Bay. I started with this warm pretzel which alarmed me at first because it didn’t have salt on it, but the spicy German mustard made it all work.

Then I was totally knocked out by my entree which may look humdrum to you — meatloaf with broccoli — but the sauce on it, made with demi-glace, made me want to go to culinary school to learn how to make it.

Demi-glace, in case you don’t know, is what you get when you make a veal stock (or a meat stock) and then reduce it and reduce it and reduce it. All of the gelatinous matter from the bones enrich the sauce and here it’s cooked with Guinness (!) and smothered all over slices of meatloaf that’ve been charred under the salamander and placed on top of the coziest mashed potatoes. The broccoli was there for some necessary greenery and was also a treat to swipe through the sauce. (Craig, as you can see, had an epic Mac n’ Cheese.)

Neither of us had room for dessert, but that didn’t stop us from ordering the warm apple pie.

No, it didn’t hold a candle to Craig’s dad’s famous apple pie (which we had on Christmas Eve), but on a cold winter’s night there’s nothing like a warm piece of cinnamony apple pie topped with vanilla ice cream.

Bravo, Boundary Bay. I’m a new fan.

The Rest: Gruyère Gougères for New Year’s, Christmas Loot, and Links.

For Christmas Eve dinner this year, I whipped up Dorie Greenspan’s original recipe for Gougères. They were such a hit served warm with cocktails and I think they’d be smashing for New Year’s Eve. You can do it all in one pot and get a workout stirring it all together with a wooden spoon.

My only adjustment was, at the beginning, I added a full teaspoon of salt, plus 1/2 a teaspoon each of freshly grated nutmeg and cayenne pepper. Otherwise, a great trick is to shape them then freeze them; you can bake them whenever your guests arrive (just a few minutes longer) and you’ll be ready to pop the champagne.

As for Christmas itself, we had a lovely dinner at Kristin and Dean’s house with lots of vaccinated and tested family members.

As for my Christmas morning loot, I gifted Craig a bunch of vintage Amaro glasses and a reservation at a hard-to-get-into sushi spot in L.A. He go the lots of stuff including this pasta Tarot deck…

…and Nigel Slater’s famous Christmas cookbook, which is a joy to read.

Considering how Omicron is rampaging across the country (we have several friends who came down with it right before we left), we feel very lucky that we made it here safely and got to enjoy each other during the holiday. I hope your holidays were great too, even if adjustments had to be made.

Now for some food links that caught my eye recently:

New York’s Top Ten Restaurants of 2021 (NYT; I’m glad I got to eat at #1!)
Food52 is now valued 3X higher than its original $100 million valuation — hope Amanda Hesser takes some time off with that money and writes the sequel to Cooking for Mr. Latte (Axios);
How Exercise Affects Metabolism and Weight Loss (NYT);
15 Must-Read Food Novels to Gift Everyone on Your List… even if Christmas is over, this is a great round-up (Bon Appétit);
Short Rib Onion Soup is the first thing that I want to make when I get back to my kitchen in L.A. (Smitten Kitchen).

That’s all for this week, folks!

The plan is for us to fly back to L.A. on Wednesday and then to drive to Palm Springs (!!) to spend New Year’s with some friends. Here’s hoping all goes according to plan.

In case you missed my last paid-subscribers only newsletter, I listed my Top Ten Restaurant Meals of 2021. If you’d like to read that, plus have access to my entire archives, here’s a discount code that’ll get you 20% off forever.

Get 20% off forever

Have a Happy New Year’s Eve, wherever you are, and I’ll see you back here in 2022.

Your friend,

Adam