Bryan and I disagree about our favorite pasta shapes.

For him, thicker is better. Chewier always wins. Long and fat is better than short and skinny. The ultimate goal? The ability to wrap the noodles around a fork into a big, dense ball so that he can create the chewiest, thickest bite of them all.

Me? First of all, I love sauce. So, the more nooks and cranny that a pasta shape has, the better. Radiatore or Fusilli are typically my favorites, though I also love a good angel hair.

One thing we both agree on - we don't like mushy pasta. Al dente all the way.

Dried Pasta with Really Good Texture?
This company called Pasta Lensi contacted me in January and asked me whether I wanted to try some of their dried pasta.

Well, Bryan loves pasta and is always looking for that perfect texture when it comes to pasta, so . . . why not? Hey, you never know.

Seriously, I didn't have super high expectations. Bryan is pretty picky when it comes to pasta texture. He almost always orders the handmade pasta option at a restaurant, almost regardless of the sauce with which it is paired. The pasta comes first!

I decided to make one of my standards - a great tomato vodka cream sauce recipe from Cook's Illustrated (see end of post). I make this dish all the time, so I thought it would be interesting to compare a new pasta brand with an age-old recipe.

The Verdict?
According to Bryan, "this is the best dried pasta I have ever had." It far beats out all the other dried pastas we've ever tried. Granted, we haven't tried too many really expensive artisanal dried pastas, but we have tried reasonably well known Italian brands, like de Cecco and Barilla, for instance.

I have to agree that the texture of this pasta is superior to your normal supermarket boxed pastas. We had been buying de Cecco before, which is still very good, but this one is noticeably better. The pasta doesn't go mushy easily.  Typically I try to take out my pastas as soon as possible because they become unbearably soft and mushy so quickly if I don't cool them down quickly. This pasta is unusually dense, or something, making it much harder to accidentally overcook and ruin.

Bryan told me to give away the rest of our pasta boxes and just order Lensi from now on.

Pasta Lensi online

Rigatoni

Trottole 

Fusilli 

Penne

Gobetti

Spaghetti

Fettuccini

Linguini

Just a bit of background
Pasta Lensi is an Italian pasta company that has been making pasta since 1920. Their pasta is still not widely available in grocery stores right now, although you can buy it on online at Amazon. Pasta Lensi is a bit more expensive than normal, but if you buy in bulk online, it's comparable to the cheaper pastas.

Giveaway Details
The folks at Pasta Lensi were kind enough to give me TWO sample gift bags so that a couple of you could try this amazing pasta.  Each bag (a Pasta Lensi cloth tote) contains two bags of dried pasta to try.

Seriously, this stuff is really good, and Bryan and I are totally planning on buying a bulk pack soon. We just need to agree on a shape!

To Enter the Giveaway:

For one entry: comment below telling me your favorite way of preparing or eating pasta!

For an extra entry: tweet the link (http://bit.ly/fKFadQ) to the giveaway and mention @tinyurbankitchn [easiest way is probably to just tweet the example tweet below). Please also comment below telling me that you tweeted.

Example tweet: @tinyurbankitchn is giving away two gourmet Italian pasta gift bags! Check it out here: http://bit.ly/fKFadQ

For a third entry: please share a link to this post on facebook. Again, please comment below telling me that you linked on facebook and tell me where to look for your link.

Here's my answer to the question:

I love a simple pasta tossed with fresh mozzarella, vine-ripen tomatoes, basil, and olive oil. I also love anything with white alba truffles!

Giveaway ends SUNDAY, March 13th at midnight.

Tomato Vodka Cream Sauce with Bacon

Slightly modified from Cook's Illustrated

Ingredients
1 (28 ounce) can whole tomatoes , drained, liquid reserved
1 T olive oil
3 ounces of pancetta (can substitute bacon)
½ small onion , minced (about ¼ cup)
1 T tomato paste
2 medium cloves garlic , minced
½ t hot red pepper flakes
⅓ cup vodka
½ cup heavy cream
1 pound pasta
Fresh basil leaves

Puree in a food processor about half of the tomatoes from the can (around 5-6). Dice the other half. Combine the puree and diced tomatoes in a 2-cup measuring cup and add the reserve liquid from the can until you have 2 cups total. Cook the pancetta in a pan until crisp (about 5-10 minutes). Remove from pan and place on paper towels. Pour off most of the oil, leaving 2 T.

Saute the onions and tomato paste in the remaining fat until the onions are shiny and a bit translucent, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and red pepper flakes and cook for another minute.

Stir in tomatoes and a tiny pinch of salt. Stir.

Remove the pot from the heating source and slowly pour in the vodka. Bring the pot back to the heating source. Turn heat back up to medium high and boil off the alcohol (about 10 minutes). Meanwhile, bring a bot of water to boil to cook the pasta. Cook pasta until al dente.

Once the alcohol has boiled off, add the cream and stir it in until hot - about 1 minute.

Mix the sauce with the cooked pasta. Stir in the freshly cut basil and the bacon. Add freshly grated Parmesan cheese on top.

Disclaimer
Time to time I receive free products, meals, etc. as a food blogger. I do not receive any payment for blog posts/reviews nor am I required to write a post when I receive free products, meals, etc. The views expressed in this post are completely my own. The pasta in this post was provided for free by Pasta Lensi.

The post Tomato Vodka Cream Sauce with Bacon + Giveaway! appeared first on Tiny Urban Kitchen.

This post is part of a larger post titled Foodbuzz 24x24: Culinary Tour Around the World - Sous Vide Style. In that post, I created a 3-course dinner showcasing the sous vide technique on a variety of cuisines. This carbonara was the "Italian" portion of that meal.

There's something really magical about the sous vide egg. It's creamy, soft, and has the most unique custardy texture. You could seriously just enjoy it with a touch of sea salt and truffle oil and call it a day.

Or you can add it to any dish that is based on an egg sauce.

In this twist on the traditional spaghetti carbonara, you toss pasta with bacon fat, cheese, white wine, and parsley and then drop a sous vide egg on top - especially fun for those who love to break up runny yolks and mix it with everything.

thinly sliced pancetta

Guanciale

People in Rome tend to use guanciale (cured pork jowls) or pancetta for this recipe. Since these are harder to find, bacon works fine as well.

It's best to get thick cut bacon if you can. I accidentally asked the butcher to slice my pancetta (oops) and thus I had to use very thinly sliced pieces, which still works OK.

Spaghetti Carbonara with Sous Vide Egg
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan


⅓ pound pancetta
3 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled
2 T extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup dry white wine
4 large eggs
¼ cup romano cheese (grated)
½ cup Parmesan-Reggiano cheese (grated)
Black pepper, ground
2 T chopped parsley
1 lb pasta

Sous Vide Egg
Set sous vide machine at 146 °F and cook eggs (in their shells) for 45 minutes.

Bring a pot of water to a boil and cook pasta. Meanwhile, cut pancetta into ¼ inch wide strips. Saute garlic and olive oil over medium heat in a skillet until the garlic is golden brown. Remove garlic. Add pancetta and cook until the edges begin to crisp. Add wine to deglaze the pan (1-2 minutes). Add cheese, chopped parsley, and ground pepper to the pancetta/wine/oil mixture and mix well. Add the cooked pasta and toss to combine.

At presentation, make a little well in the center of the pasta and drop in the sous vide egg.

Enjoy!

The post (Deconstructed) Spaghetti Carbonara with Sous Vide Egg appeared first on Tiny Urban Kitchen.

I am pleased to partner with Genova, who makes canned yellowfin tuna, for this post on a canned tuna pasta that I made using their product.

Happy Friday!

I'm frantically working up all my photos (close to 700!) from my week-long trip to London and Munich. Until then, we will take a brief pause and head on over to my kitchen, where I've actually been cooking A LOT lately!

While I was in Germany, the very first shipment of my summer CSA (community supported agriculture) farm share came in. A weekly farm share is great because it ensure that I eat plenty of vegetables. The element of surprise each week ("what will come in my share today?"), is fun and stretches my creativity as I think up new ways to use all the produce.

I typically end up cooking a lot more during the summer months, sometimes in Herculean efforts to "use up the farm share." In fact, this week I cooked every single day (with the exception of one crazy late night ramen adventure that stretched into the early morning).

Right before I left for Europe, another fun shipment came in - a special treat from Genova. Genova, who makes Mediterranean-style (packed in olive oil) premium tuna sent me a gorgeous gift basket complete with cans of premium yellowfin tuna, olive tapenade, artichokes, a bottle of wine, cheese, crackers, a cute olivewood cheeseboard (or maybe cutting board?) from Sur La Table, and even a book on Mediterranean cooking!

I'm not exactly an expert on Mediterranean cooking, but Bryan loves pasta, and I had tons of gorgeous greens from my farm share.

Inspired by the various ingredients they sent (plus the fact that I was short on time that evening), I whipped up a super fast dinner using about half of the ingredients from the gift basket.
I chopped up TONS of garlic (you can never have too much garlic, ha ha!) and slowly cooked them over super low heat in olive oil.

After about 10 minutes or so (you don't want them to brown!), I added the whole jar of marinated artichokes.

I then opened up the cans of tuna and added them. I was surprised at the quality of the tuna. Maybe I still have visions of the simple cans ("packed in water") that I used to eat growing up - pale, shredded tuna that worked great in tuna salad but would not be chunky enough for a pasta application.

This tuna was definitely different, and changed my internal perception about canned tuna. Not only does it hold up to fancier dishes, I like the fact that it's wild caught (not farmed!) and a sustainable fish. I kept thinking, "hmmm, it's not a bad idea to have a few cans of tuna around for those times when Bryan asks, 'where's the meat?'" In our household fish counts as "meat". I think he really just means protein - aka, please don't just cook the farm share vegetables and call that a meal.

I threw in a bunch of the gorgeous spinach from my farmshare, added a bit of salt and a touch of finishing olive oil, and I was done! The tuna, artichokes, and olive tapenade added plenty of flavor, and I barely had to do anything to make this pasta taste really good.

GIVEAWAY!

I am thrilled to be able to give away another gift basket full of Mediterranean goodies (just like the one I got!). To enter, please comment below answering one (or more, or even all if you wish) of the questions:

1) your favorite Mediterranean food(s)

2) your favorite Mediterranean restaurant

2) any fun trips this summer planned?

One entry per person. Giveaway ends in Tuesday, June 23rd at midnight, East Coast Time. If you are interested in trying out the tuna, here is a $1 off coupon.

Enjoy!

Update! Congrats to Teresa for winning the Giveaway! Teresa said the following answer:

1. Caprese salad
2. Mamma Maria or Carlo’s Cucina Italiana in Boston
3. I’m heading to Greece for a wedding in a few weeks! Can’t wait for the food!

Thanks for participating!

Disclaimer - this post is sponsored by Genova. I did not pay for the Mediterranean basket of ingredients. All opinions are my own.

The post Pasta with Tuna, Artichokes, and Olives + Giveaway! appeared first on Tiny Urban Kitchen.

This post is the 16th post in the #21PostsInMay Challenge. All other posts published in the month of May can be found here.

Happy Spring!

Bostonians - are you loving this weather or what? After such a long, hard winter, it's been glorious to bask in the sunshine and finally step outside in shorts (!). Spring is also one of my favorite seasons because of the unique produce that pops up during this time of year. I've been seeing lots of asparagus, morel mushrooms, ramps, and fiddleheads at the restaurants around me.

I recently started a new job that's located about a 2-minute walk from Whole Foods.

It's so dangerous!

I've always liked going to the Whole Foods salad bar for lunch. Yes, it's definitely pricey, but it's hard to get such a wide variety of high quality fruits and vegetables everyday for lunch otherwise (we'll see if that changes once my CSA farm share begins!). I usually try to keep my lunch around $7-8, which isn't horrible. I like how I can sample random things I would probably never buy outright, like seitan, various types of marinated tofu, various Ethiopian "sauces", and other unusual grains. It's also a simple way to get lots of different fruits without committing to larger packages.

The more dangerous part about visiting Whole Foods is not the salad bar. It's the produce section.

I really shouldn't "just stop by to see what they have" so regularly. But I can't help it.

And then I spot the ramps or the fiddleheads, and my restraint breaks completely.

Before you know it, I'm holding onto bags of random spring vegetables plus my little carton of salad from the salad bar and I'm ringing up a $30 "lunch".

Oops!

I guess there are benefits.

My ~ $20 worth of spring vegetables plus the gorgeous spicy fennel sausage I got at Savenor's in Cambridge still cost a lot less than a similar quality meal at a restaurant. Better yet, we get to open our own wines, relax at home, and (sometimes), have enough leftovers for the next day.

This pasta recipe incorporates ramps, (optionally) fiddleheads, and spicy sausage. It is crazy simple and absolutely delicious. You can definitely finish everything in less than 30 minutes, maybe even less if you are speedy. Perfect for a quick, weeknight meal.

When a recipe is this simple, quality of ingredients is very important. I love the meat products at Savenor's, and their spicy fennel sausage is really good. I pretty much just use one link for the two of us, removing the casing and breaking it up in the pan.

Having really good pasta makes a huge different too. I tried this recipe twice, once with fresh pasta from a local vendor in New Hampshire and once with a dried pasta from Italy. Though both were tasty, the version made with fresh pasta was far superior largely because the pasta itself had such an incredible texture and was so flavorful.

Make sure to generously salt the pasta water and bring it to a rolling boil. Little things like this surprisingly make a big difference. I've learned (from experience!) not to take shortcuts in this area.

I'm sure you can be creative with this recipe. I have found that the tastiest version was the simplest. In fact, my favorite version of this dish only had ramps and sausage (no fiddleheads!). I think the ramps flavor come out more when there isn't competition from the fiddleheads. However, I do love fiddleheads so the version with them in it was still tasty, it just had less ramps flavor.

In any event, have fun with this, especially since ramps season is almost over.

Enjoy!

The post Pasta with Ramps, Fiddleheads, and Sausage appeared first on Tiny Urban Kitchen.

I love learning new cooking techniques from my favorite chefs.

Earlier this year, I attended a fun "Tomato Vine Dining Tour" sponsored by Muir Glen at one of my favorite restaurants, Garden at the Cellar. Will Gilson, who (until recently) was the head chef there, shared with us how he uses canned tomatoes in the winter time to carry him through when doesn't have fresh produce.

Better yet, he shared one of his pasta recipes with us that involves sausage, kale, and (canned) tomatoes.

What I love best about this recipe is his use of egg yolks and lemon zest in the sauce. Deceptively simple, these hidden ingredients elevate an otherwise simple olive-oil sauce to new and more complex levels of depth and flavor.

I wish I had orecchiette on hand (it would have made for such better photos). Nevertheless, spaghetti still works reasonably well (though it doesn't catch as much sauce as a pasta with more nooks and crannies would).

This recipe is reasonably flexible, and I don't see a problem with switching out kale for another vegetable or changing pasta shapes (although some pasta shapes do work better than others). I do think it's important to keep most of the other ingredients, including the aromatics (onions/garlic), the Parmesan cheese, egg yolks, and lemon zest.

Seeing as fresh, locally grown tomatoes are not yet available in Boston yet, it's not that much of a sin to use organic canned tomatoes, right?

Enjoy!

Orecchiette with braised kale, fire-roasted tomatoes and grilled Italian sausage
Source: Will Gilson on behalf of Muir Glen

Prep Time: 20 mins
Cook Time: 45 mins
Servings: 6

3 Italian sausages (about ¾ pound)
1 pound uncooked orecchiette (tiny disk) pasta
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
Grated peel of 1 medium lemon (2-3 teaspoons)
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon ground pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon finely chopped garlic
¼ cup finely diced onion
2 bunches kale, washed, rough chopped (about 6 cups)
2 cans (14.5 ounces) fire roasted diced tomatoes, undrained
1 cup shredded Parmesan cheese

In nonstick skillet, cover and cook sausages over medium heat about 15 minutes or until no longer pink in center. When cool enough to handle, cut into ½-inch slices.

Cook and drain pasta reserving ½ cup of hot pasta water. In 1 ½-quart saucepan, use wire whisk to vigorously stir eggs, egg yolks, lemon peel, salt and pepper, then slowly beat reserved hot pasta water into egg mixture. Heat over low heat, stirring constantly for about 10 minutes until sauce is creamy and thickened.

In nonstick skillet, heat olive oil over medium-high heat. Cook garlic 1-2 minutes or until garlic becomes toasted. Add onion, kale and tomatoes; cover. Cook 5-10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until kale is wilted. Remove from heat. Stir sausage, pasta, kale mixture, Parmesan cheese and sauce into large bowl.

Disclaimer: The Muir Glen canned tomatoes in this post were provided by Muir Glen

The post Pasta with Sausage, Kale, and Tomatoes appeared first on Tiny Urban Kitchen.