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This Week's Recipe: Pasta Puttanesca
Mar. 15th, 2016 11:19 pmMy dad is visiting this week, and I wanted to get in a little home cooking. Easy pasta recipes are a staple of cooking for parents, so I figured I'd better have some of Julie's favorites figured out before we return to work.
This week's recipe was based on the recipe for Spaghetti alla Puttanesca in Diane Seed's The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces (in the "Garlic, Olive Oil, Chili" chapter).
Choices and substitutions: Instead of spaghetti, I used a package of whole-wheat fusilli. The instructions on the package were somewhat strange, calling for cooking the pound of pasta in five quarts of water with a quarter-cup of salt, which struck me as an unnecessarily huge amount of water and an absurd-seeming ratio of salt. I didn't use nearly that much water, or nearly that proportion of salt, though I did still salt the water pretty heavily. I also cooked the pasta in the sauce for two minutes at the end, per the suggestion on the pasta package.
How it turned out: It was a hit, but anyone who didn't like their pasta quite salty would have been displeased. For those that like their pasta dishes less salty, I would suggest not salting the water and reducing the amount of capers and anchovies (or leaving those out entirely). Cooking the pasta in the sauce would probably be a bad idea for long, thin pasta like spaghetti, but worked very well for the fusilli.
This week's recipe was based on the recipe for Spaghetti alla Puttanesca in Diane Seed's The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces (in the "Garlic, Olive Oil, Chili" chapter).
Choices and substitutions: Instead of spaghetti, I used a package of whole-wheat fusilli. The instructions on the package were somewhat strange, calling for cooking the pound of pasta in five quarts of water with a quarter-cup of salt, which struck me as an unnecessarily huge amount of water and an absurd-seeming ratio of salt. I didn't use nearly that much water, or nearly that proportion of salt, though I did still salt the water pretty heavily. I also cooked the pasta in the sauce for two minutes at the end, per the suggestion on the pasta package.
How it turned out: It was a hit, but anyone who didn't like their pasta quite salty would have been displeased. For those that like their pasta dishes less salty, I would suggest not salting the water and reducing the amount of capers and anchovies (or leaving those out entirely). Cooking the pasta in the sauce would probably be a bad idea for long, thin pasta like spaghetti, but worked very well for the fusilli.
