There is no halibut recipe here
Work has been consuming me for the last week, and in a really boring way that doesn’t bear description. Meanwhile Adam’s personality has continued to change and when I come home paying attention to my son before he morphs right out from under us is equally consuming. Then I go to sleep and wake up the next day and repeat the whole process.
Friday is a little different though, because Magda has a student, our midwife’s daughter Eva, who comes for English tutoring each Friday afternoon. Also my work ends earlier on Friday afternoons so even if I stop at the Mercator to buy halibut and chardonnay I am home well before Eva arrives at 17.00 for work on her present perfect. Then I pack up the boy and take him for a push around Nova Gorica.
There isn’t a lot to see or do in this little town, but it’s pleasant enough and very voziček-friendly. We mostly look in shop windows and admire the creative grafitti (more on this coming soon) and then go to the personality-free main square and sit at a sidewalk café and drink a Laško®. By this time Adam is usually asleep. Yesterday he stayed awake for nearly the entire 90-minute push, gazing in an interested way out of his voziček as the April world streamed past or batting at his colorful spinning teddies to make them spin above his head.
That was yesterday and as we sat at the Splendid Bar (that’s its name; it’s not all that splendid) the sky darkened and I thought we might be rained on before we got home, but the rain didn’t come until after dark when I was making orecchiette with three cheeses, because my lovely wife was tired of doing virtually everything all week and because she doesn’t like pasta much but she does like orecchiette and she likes stinky gorgonzola. Here’s how to make it:
Open a bottle of chardonnay and pour a big glass.
Dice some pancetta or bacon and sweat it slowly with a chopped onion, two cloves of garlic, and some chopped basil leaves. While this is sweating you can boil four etti of pasta. (An etto is the right amount for one person, 100 grams). Vegetarians could omit the pancetta and use a little olive oil instead, or they could get real and admit that bacon is one more sign that God loves us.
When the onion and garlic are soft and the pancetta is beginning to brown, raise the heat and then cool it down with a splash of that chardonnay. Add some heavy cream and a handful of parmesan. Lower the heat and let the cream thicken, but not too much; a little more wine goes in if it gets too stiff. Note: this is NOT LOW-FAT. Did you expect to live forever?
Make a quick salad; rocket, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes?
Drain the pasta and return it to the cooking pot.
Take six little mozzarella balls, or half of a full-sized one, and chop roughly. Add 2/3 of this and a Nokia-sized piece of gorgonzola to the sauce and take it off the heat. Stir it well and pour it over the drained pasta. Mix well and put it in an (olive) oiled baking dish.
Over the top of the pasta place the rest of the mozzarella, a little stinky gorgonzola, and a sprinkling of parmesan and basil. Put it in the oven while you wash your baby, which is plenty of time for the cheese on top to melt and the flavors to meld. Dry baby, oil, and eat (pasta, not baby) with that salad. And some chardonnay.
I’m surprised, J, that given your penchant for consuming all creatures great and small (not to mention esoteric) you’d opt for a meat as pedestrian as cured pork in this dish. Why not octopus? Why not diced rabbit? Why not perhaps some shavings of wild boar? Surely you can do better than bacon.
Comment by Emily — Wednesday 13 April 05 @ 01.24 MDT+2.00
[...] es are beckoning, because unlike a diamond, gazpacho is not forever. Previous recipes: Pasta with three cheeses Pulled pork Haggis Happy fish Melitzanosalata
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[...] hat I read. What initially attracted me to this recipe was the simplicity. I’ve made my views about pork clear before, and this is a great porkcentric dish. It is also simpler to make than a gin and to [...]
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