This week we did our annual car camping trip to Washington Park on Fidalgo Island. It rained. Welcome to a Pacific Northwest summer.

Fortunately the firewood we brought burned well, and we were able to successfully cook our dinner. Hebrew National hot dogs, blistered over the fire and dressed with sweet relish and very hot Dijon mustard, macaroni salad, Bonny Doon grenache, and toasted marshmallows. I tend to think that, if you don’t cook it on a stick over the fire, it’s not real camping food. Except the macaroni salad, which can be scooped directly out of its tupperware in case you don’t feel like washing extra dishes. 

You probably don’t need a recipe for toasted marshmallows (although it was fun taking these pictures), but I’m happy to share my macaroni salad with you. This was actually the first time I’ve made it myself – it worked very well, considering I was making it up as I went along. And being rained on didn’t seem to hurt it any.

Macaroni Salad for Two (a very loosely estimated recipe)

• 1/4 pound elbow macaroni
• Half of a large carrot, finely diced
• 1/2 cup Best Foods mayonnaise
• 1/4 cup or so cider vinegar
• 2 scallions, finely chopped
• 3 radishes, finely diced
• a handful of fresh chives, finely chopped
• salt and pepper

Cook the macaroni in boiling salted water until just done, adding the minced carrot to the pot a few minutes before the end. Drain and rinse well with cold water. Make sure it has completely cooled before continuing.

Mix all the other ingredients into the cooled pasta. Taste for seasoning, and refrigerate. If you make it a day ahead, like I did, be aware the noodles will absorb most of the dressing. Be prepared to add more mayonnaise. Do not, I repeat, do not use Miracle Whip. Or if you do, don’t tell me about it – I don’t want to know.

In the morning, by the way, the sun came out. Were we surprised? No.

Ever since our last cooking class with Casey Schanen, I’ve been thinking fondly of his ravioli stuffed with fresh peas and feta, served in a lemon beurre blanc. We received a ravioli making kit for Christmas, and fresh shelling peas just appeared in the market. Our choice for Sunday dinner was clear.

For the filling, I wanted to use Gothberg Farms fresh chevre, because I am still newly in love with this cheese and I want to use it in everything. This particular ball of cheese had a distinctly grassy note entwined with its sweet milkiness. It seemed made to go with peas.

First, we shelled our peas. I blanched them in boiling water for two minutes, then drained and cooled them. I set aside a few peas to go on top of the ravioli, but mashed the rest lightly with a spoon before adding the goat cheese along with some salt and pepper. In retrospect, a little lemon zest would have been nice as well. And perhaps a little chopped fresh mint. Next time…

I made a small amount of pasta dough with one egg and about equal parts unbleached flour and semolina flour. The ravioli mold is exactly the width of a sheet of pasta made from our hand-crank machine, so we had some fun trying to get the dough to come out full width. The mold worked great, though – you lay a sheet on the bottom mold, then press it down with the top piece to create hollows for the filling. Then you lay another pasta sheet on top and roll over it with a rolling pin to seal and cut the edges. Very easy, and makes much prettier ravioli than the ones I’ve done by hand.

The finished ravioli went into the pot of boiling salted water, inflated beautifully and danced around for five minutes (not a single one leaked, yay!). I fished them out carefully and dressed them with hot butter, peas, parsley and tarragon. A sprinkle of coarse salt at the end made it perfect.

With small filets of pan-seared sockeye salmon and an incredible Cabernet Franc rosé from Chinook Winery, this made a beautiful spring supper.

Since our local farmer’s market doesn’t start for another month, we drove up to Bellingham last week to see how their market was doing. Man! I have serious market envy. Not that I don’t love ours, of course, but wow.

Covering a large parking lot as well as filling the big permanent covered area the city built, the market is thriving, not just with local fresh vegetables and crafts, but food carts, plants, bread, meat, clothing and henna tattoo artists. Instead of a main stage, they have the old-fashioned approach of letting acoustic musicians set up in the intersections. A hula-hoop area is set up on one side for the amusement of limber youth, and the goat-with-a-cart sculpture on the corner is constantly beset by children. People are everywhere, shopping and visiting and hula-hooping and eating.

The market booth had some really excellent ballcaps. Jon bought himself one, while I ogled the croissants and rhubarb tarts in the neighboring stall.

We wandered the circuit, picking up our favorite semolina crackers and a couple of macaroons from the Breadfarm booth, plus a magnificent head of napa cabbage and some spinach and asparagus. As we headed back through the center aisle we saw this amazing display of pastas, right next to a booth of exquisite cupcakes (salted caramel, oh my) and a blend-your-own-smoothie station with built-in bicycles.

The pasta, made by the Bellingham Pasta Company,  looked gorgeous and didn’t seem exorbitantly expensive. We picked up a pound of lemon-black pepper linguine, then tore ourselves away to go make lunch at home.

That pasta? It was fantastic. When I opened the packet a cloud of lemon scent wafted out, and the pepper came through in every bite. It cooked perfectly in 3-4 minutes and did not stick to itself. We had it for lunch two days running, both times using leftovers from a Gretchen’s class.

The first day I chopped up these incredible pink oyster mushrooms and sauteed them with roasted garlic, then mixed in smoked salmon and some goat cheese. That was pretty good.

The second day I used chopped crimini mushrooms and leeks, mixed in sliced serrano ham, then tossed the pasta with it and added some of its cooking water along with finely chopped parsley and grated parmesan. That was really, really good. Really.

We still have a few weeks until our own market starts up, so I suspect we’ll be heading up to Bellingham again soon. What pasta lunches might we end up with next time?

We had originally planned to have steak for dinner, but I was feeling tired and steak sounded like a lot of work to eat, so we did a little menu rearrangement. We had bought a cauliflower with the intention of making Pasta al Cavolfiore, a comforting Moosewood standby from our college days, and it was just the thing for my mood. My husband used to make this for me when we were first going out, and I find it soothing.

Because this is a recipe from the 1977 Moosewood Cookbook, a book that could have been commissioned by the Eat More Cheese Association, it’s less of an Italian pasta dish and more like a vat of cauliflower cheese with some pasta and tomato thrown in. You don’t really have to add as much cheese as the recipe says to – it would still taste great – but I admit a lot of the appeal here is the dense richness of the cheesy pasta, studded with tart bits of cauliflower and herb. We do veer away from the Moosewood vegetarian standard by adding some chunks of seared kielbasa, which adds a nice smokiness, as well as heft.

We never seem to make less than a full recipe of this stuff, even though it takes us days to eat the leftovers. I should mention that this is one of the few things that doesn’t really work with a fried egg on top. Yes, I tried it.

Pasta al Cavalfiore

adapted from (the old version of) The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen

• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 large cauliflower, broken into bite-size pieces
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 tsp dried basil, or 1 Tbsp fresh julienned basil
• 2 cups or 1 large can tomato puree or crushed tomato
• salt and pepper
• 2 cups grated cheese, Parmesan or Cheddar or a blend
• 1 kielbasa or other smoked sausage
• 1 lb pasta (we like penne)

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Add the garlic and bay leaf, and the basil if using dried. Saute for a minute, then add the cauliflower, salt lightly and saute, adding water if necessary, until the cauliflower is tender. If using fresh basil (we often get those bundles of hydroponic basil this time of year, it’s wonderful having it fresh) add it now. Add the tomato and simmer 15 minutes or so.

If adding kielbasa, slice the sausage thickly and arrange the pieces in a nonstick skillet over medium high heat. Sear, turning once, until the pieces are hot and slightly caramelized. Set aside.

Cook the pasta until just done, reserving some of the water before draining. Stir the pasta into the cauliflower-tomato sauce, adding a bit of the pasta water if it seems too thick. Stir in the cheese, and the kielbasa if using. Serve right away.

I don’t know if we make this dish mainly because it’s tasty, or because it’s so much fun to set fire to a panful of shrimp. Probably both.

Shrimp fra diavolo (“Brother Devil”) is a traditional dish, the main idea being a spicy tomato sauce with shrimp, saucing long skinny pasta. The version we make comes from an old issue of Cook’s Illustrated. It adds an extra step or two to the typical recipe, but it’s well worth the effort. If you’ve never flambéed before, give it a try – it’s gratifyingly easy. Just make sure there’s nothing flammable right above your stove burners. You can skip the flambéing step, but the shrimp won’t have as deep and rich a flavor.

First you toss the raw, peeled shrimp with hot pepper flakes, as much as you think you can stand, plus some salt and olive oil.

The shrimp are seared in a very hot pan, then pulled off the heat. Add some brandy (a quarter cup for a pound of shrimp), put it back over the heat, and tip the pan to let the brandy fumes come in contact with the open flame (or use a match)…

Once the shrimp are engulfed in flames, just shake the pan and wait until the fire dies down – it won’t take long for the alcohol to burn off. Scrape the shrimp into a bowl.

After being flambéed, the shrimp take on a slightly caramelized coating, and the hot pepper flavor is really seared in.

Then all you need to do is put the pan back on medium-low heat, sauté minced garlic in a bit of fresh olive oil until golden, toss in a can of tomatoes and some white wine, simmer it down and add the shrimp back in along with some minced raw garlic and chopped parsley. Cook some pasta and toss everything together. A chilled white wine goes well with the spicy shrimp.

This is an awesome lasagna. I’m not kidding, it’s really, really good. Unless you don’t like mushrooms, of course, in which case I can’t help you. This is all about the mushrooms. And the cheese.

I got the idea for this lasagna from a recipe in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, but I embellished it a bit with extra cheese and a generous amount of sausage, because I tend to feel that sausage makes everything better. One technique of hers that I think is really key here is adding the porcini soaking liquid to the bechamel. It gives the creamy sauce an earthy perfume that I find irresistible.

The last time we made this we fully intended to make fresh pasta sheets, but I got tired at the last minute and pulled out some oven-ready lasagna noodles. I definitely want to try it with homemade, though, I think it would be ethereally exquisite. Or should that be exquisitely ethereal?

Mushroom Lasagna (a suggested recipe – adapt to your own taste)

• 1 oz dried porcini mushrooms
• 3 portobello mushrooms, chopped
• 1 lb. button mushrooms, chopped
• 1 shallot or onion, chopped
• 1 pound loose pork sausage
• handful chopped parsley (optional)
• 3 Tbsp butter
• 3 Tbsp flour
• 2 cups milk
• 1 package (or a little less) oven-ready lasagna noodles, or about a pound fresh cooked lasagna noodles
• 1 lb ricotta
• small round of mozzarella cheese, sliced

Preheat the oven to 375°.

Put the porcini in a bowl and pour about a cup of hot water over them. Let them sit while you do the sauce and filling.

Melt the butter in a heavy pot. Add the flour and whisk up well, then cook over medium heat until it gets foamy and golden. Pour in a cup of milk and whisk well, then gradually add the second cup of milk. Bring to a low simmer and cook, whisking occasionally.

Saute the pork sausage in a skillet until fully cooked and broken up. Drain off the fat.

In a large skillet, heat a few good dollops of olive oil and add the shallot. Cook until a bit soft, then add all the chopped mushrooms. Cook until soft and fragrant. Dump in the sausage and stir. Pull the porcini out of their soaking liquid (don’t get rid of it!), roughly chop, and add them to the pan as well. Stir in parsley, if using.

Add the porcini liquid to the simmering white sauce and whisk it thoroughly. The sauce should be thickening to a good gravy consistency. If it’s too thick, add more milk. When it’s a good texture, take it off the heat and build your lasagna.

Smear some sauce in the bottom of a 9″x13″ roasting pan. Lay out your noodles in the appropriate spacing (check the box instructions). Smear more sauce on, ladle on plenty of mushroom-sausage filling, then drop chunks of ricotta all over. Scatter a little mozzarella. Lay on more noodles and repeat until the pan is full. When you put on the last layer of noodles, top with more mozzarella and pour over all the remaining sauce. Cover tightly with foil. Bake about half an hour, then remove the foil and bake another ten minutes, until the lasagna is bubbling nicely and the cheese on top is just browning.

Let cool slightly before digging in. Makes great leftovers.

One of the real perks of living in Ellensburg, as we did many years ago, was proximity to the town of Cle Elum, home of Glondo’s Sausages. Recently recovered from a serious bout of vegetarianism, we were ready to take advantage of Glondo’s wonderful products, and this recipe is what we invariably made when we were feeling festive. Now that we’re an inconvenient 140 miles from Glondo’s, we have to make do with the sausages from our local grocery, but the pasta is still very tasty.

Gemelli with Wine-Braised Sausage
adapted from The Splendid Table: Recipes from Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food by Lynne Rossetto Kasper

• 1/2 pound gemelli pasta (rotini or farfalle would do nicely here as well)
• 2 hot Italian sausages, sliced into 1/2 inch rounds
• 1 Tbsp olive oil
• 1 small onion, finely diced
• 1 small to medium carrot, very finely diced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 3 Tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
• 2 fresh sage leaves
• pinch of ground cloves
• 1/2 cup white wine (I used Viognier this time, as it was open, but a drier white would do better)
• 1 can diced tomatoes

Put on the pasta to cook until just al dente. Drain and set aside.

Saute the sausage pieces in a large heavy skillet, until browned. Remove from the pan, leaving a spoonful of fat behind.

Add the olive oil to the drippings, and saute the onion, carrots and parsley in the fat until soft.

Add the browned sausage chunks, garlic and sage and cook a few minutes, then add the pinch of cloves and half the wine and bring to a bubble. Make sure to scrape all the good stuff off the bottom of the pan. When the wine has boiled dry, add the rest. Set it to a slow burble and leave it for about 10 minutes.

Pour in the tomatoes and their juice and simmer until the sauce is slightly thickened.

Add the cooked pasta to the sauce and toss well. You can add a little of the pasta cooking water if the sauce needs thinning out. Serve. I don’t usually add cheese to this dish, but grated parmesan certainly wouldn’t hurt it any. Open some red wine.

My original plan for Halloween dinner was to try a recipe for sweet potato gnocchi from the penultimate issue of Gourmet (sigh), but the little sugar pie pumpkin that I bought at Gordon’s was looking at me reproachfully. Right. I put off the gnocchi in favor of a sort-of repeat of last year’s pumpkin ravioli. Why did I think it would be less painful this time?

As you may recall, last year’s ravioli was from Mario Batali’s Babbo Cookbook. This time I went back to an old favorite, Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s bible of Emilia-Romagna food, The Splendid Table. Her recipe for squash-filled pasta is one that I’ve made before, and it has a particularly nice flavor. You make it by roasting a small halved and cleaned pumpkin (or butternut squash) and a whole sweet potato, then pureeing their flesh with a hint of nutmeg and grated Parmesan. It’s delicious all by itself, and wonderful with pasta and sage butter.

I won’t go into the details of making ravioli, particularly when it involves insufficient counter space and a sad lack of patience on the cook’s part (I did a step-by-step post last year, anyway). Suffice it to say I did not quite crawl weeping into the bathroom in the middle of the process. And we did end up with a dinner’s worth of sweet ravioli drenched in melted butter and fresh sage, as well as half a pound of homemade fettucine hung to dry for the next day.

Which, by the way, made an excellent lunch tossed with the leftover squash filling and some sliced Italian sausage. Delicious, and much easier on the nerves than filled pasta.

Despite the difficulties, it was a good Halloween.

I recently invented this soup, and its become one of our favorites – as it turns out, really just a version of pasta e fagioli (Italian for noodles and beans, also known as pasta fazool). It also happens to be one of the easiest soups I’ve ever made, with the exception of the kind that involve opening a can or two. The first time I made it with freshly shelled borlotti beans from Colony Creek Farm (which were incredible), and the second time I used some locally grown, cupboard-aged Calypso beans (like little Yin-Yangs) that had taken up embarrassing residence in my pantry. Good thing dried beans don’t go bad very quickly.

I’ve found that this soup is best when the beans are as soft and creamy as possible. I recently started using a technique that Cook’s Illustrated worked out: soaking the beans in brine, then rinsing them and cooking them at a very slow simmer. It produces incredibly smooth, creamy beans with a soft skin. Well worth doing if you have time to soak them.

This is a seriously warm and comforting soup for a cold, difficult day.

Pasta Fazool

• 1 cup beans, dried or fresh-shelled, or 1 can of white beans
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 pound hot Italian sausage (uncased)
• 2 carrots
• maybe some celery
• some chicken stock, or just water
• 1 cup dried macaroni noodles

If using dried beans: Eight hours before, soak the beans in a bowl of water with a large spoonful of salt mixed in. Before cooking, rinse them thoroughly.

Put the soaked or fresh shell beans into a pan with the bay leaf and cover with water. Bring just to a boil, then turn down to a gentle simmer and cook for an hour or until tender. Time will depend on how old and crotchety your beans are.

Dice the carrots and celery and saute them in olive oil in a soup pot. Add the sausage and cook until the pink is gone (or you can cook the sausage in a separate pan if you want to skim off some of the fat). Add the beans and their cooking liquid, then add stock or water until there’s plenty of liquid in the pan. Bring it all to a boil, add the noodles and cook until they’re as done as you like. Add salt if desired. You could add a can of tomatoes as well, if you like.

Eat right away, or stick into the fridge for later reheating. The longer it sits, the better it tastes.

One of my personal rituals is to always, always make macaroni and cheese for myself on my birthday. It’s never quite the same from year to year, though: last year I used multi-colored vegetable shell noodles and a creamy sharp cheddar sauce. This year I decided to try a new approach, inspired by a recipe on Food52, posted by my friend Jen of the blog Last Night’s Dinner (featured in this week’s New York Times dining section, check it out!). Her original recipe is here; I failed to follow it exactly (surprise!) but I think I managed to capture the spirit of the dish.

This recipe differs from my usual approach in several ways: it uses several different kinds of cheese, it has herbs, mustard powder and hot sauce for added flavor, and it’s baked with a breadcrumb topping. Much to my surprise, it was quite possibly the best mac and cheese I’ve ever eaten in my life. Instead of the hard cheese crust I’ve come to associate with baked macaroni and cheese, this had a delicate buttery crunch giving way to creamy, rich noodles.

Instead of the cast iron pan called for in the recipe, I chose to use our medium Le Creuset pan (inherited from Jon’s grandmother) - partly because it was a better size for the scaled-down amount I was making, and partly because I was worried about taking the seasoning off our good iron pan. Le Creuset enamelled pans will come clean after anything.

We drank a white wine from Tildio Winery (bought on our last visit to Lake Chelan) that happened to be in the fridge. Called Ideále, it’s a lightly oaked blend of Chardonnay and Viognier, and it was a magnificent match for the cheesy, lightly herbed pasta. We also had a small amount of a Spanish red wine left over from a previous meal, and it overwhelmed the macaroni something terrible. White was definitely the way to go here.

This would be a fabulous dish to serve for dinner along with some sauteed greens or a sharp bitter salad. But I can recommend a big plate of it for lunch with nothing but a bottle of wine and some good company. What more do you need for a birthday lunch?

Birthday Mac and Cheese 2009

adapted from a recipe by Jennifer Hess

serves 2-4

• ½ pound macaroni pasta
• 2 Tbsp butter
• 2 Tbsp flour
• 1 ½ cups whole milk
• ½ tsp Colman’s dry mustard powder
• 2 dashes Melinda’s habanero sauce
• ½ tsp kosher salt
• ½ cup grated cheddar (all cheese amounts are approximate)
• ½ cup grated gruyere
• ¼ cup grated pecorino romano
• ¼ cup grated parmesan
• ½ cup breadcrumbs
• 1 Tbsp fresh parsley, chopped
• 1 Tbsp fresh thyme, chopped

Preheat the oven to 400° and put on a pot of water to boil.

Cook the pasta according to its directions. Drain and set aside.

In a small bowl, combine the breadcrumbs, herbs, and parmesan.

In a medium skillet, melt the butter over medium-high heat. Whisk in the flour and cook for a few minutes, until it smells toasty. Pour in the milk and whisk smooth. Let it simmer until it begins to thicken, and stir in the mustard, hot sauce and salt. Begin adding in handfuls of cheese, stirring the sauce smooth between additions.

When the cheese is all melted in, add the pasta to the skillet and fold it into the sauce. Sprinkle the breadcrumb mixture evenly over the top and pop the skillet into the oven. Bake about 25 minutes, until the topping is golden and the sauce is bubbling up around the edges.

Let the pan sit for five minutes, if you can stand it, then serve.