DIY Pasta–no chic gadgets needed

Although I’ve watched my share of “Make Your Own Pasta” cooking demos over the years, I know perfectly well from hard experience that kneading by hand is going to precede rolling out by hand, and that the food processor will make at least one of these ordeals faster and less of a pain. It will also give me a better product. Even, or especially, without a pasta crank, since I don’t have one.

Tabbouleh vs. me

But let me explain something I learned the hard way about making things from scratch. There’s a reason the boxes of commercial just-pour-boiling-water-on-it-and-wait tabbouleh are so tiny.

Microwave Tricks: Make-Ahead Stuffed Shells

Stuffed shells and other vegetarian pasta casseroles cook up quickly from scratch in a microwave and they reheat well the next day.

Couscous, its own fine self

The first couscous I ever ate was at a really dingy hole-in-the-wall in Israel. But the couscous itself was so light and fine it was like eating hot curried snowflakes. What was it? How do you do that? And in half a year of eating at other people’s homes, I never ate a couscous that delicate again. You haven’t either, I’ll bet. Couscous out of a box will never do it. Neither will rolling the grains by hand and steaming them in a couscoussiere. But when I came back to the US, I made up my own quick method for the ultra-fine version and it comes out close to right. Now if only I had someone’s mother to make me the tagine to go with it.

New Page Up: Carb Counts and Ratios

Although the American Dietetic Association’s “Choose Your Foods” carb count guide for diabetics is pretty helpful (and pretty inexpensive) it’s written from the perspective of the eater, not the cook. So as the cook in my family I’ve worked out the approximate ratios of carb grams per total weight of some common foods I serve routinely. Sometimes you want to know how much of a given potato your kid can eat for a single carb serving. Sometimes you want to know how much trouble you’re in for that blackberry pie. It’s all good.

Italian Impromptu: Not Bad for an Actor (and Son)

“Don’t Fill up on the Antipasto” is a better-written, more down-to-earth read than you might think. Instead of a prolonged “Remember me? I used to play —- on Taxi!” it’s (mostly) a Brooklyn childhood memoir with old-style Italian recipes. Because a garbageman’s day started early in the morning, Danza’s father was the daily cook in the family. So a lot of Danza’s reminiscences reverse the standard gender stereotypes and honor his father’s efforts, ability and economy in the kitchen.

For recipe sodium counts, better do your own math

Another Martha Rose Shulman recipe for a peanut sauce to go with soba and other noodles appears in today’s NY Times “Recipes for Health” column. Which would be fine but the nutrition counts below it don’t add up–at least for sodium. She’s specified unsalted peanut butter–but has 1 or 2 tablespoons of regular, not low-sodium, [...]

Cheese sauce, better than instant

Want real cheese sauce but hate fussing with a roux? This one takes five minutes start to finish, and tastes like cheddar, not like a box.

Rethinking everything

Diabetes is one hell of a verdict when you think your kid is just growing, and then just has a simple stomach virus, and it turns out to be neither of those things. It was also one of those strange fairytale paradoxes by which a cursed or poisoned feather turns out to save the princess in rags. So here we are at home again, a week into learning how to manage for survival, trainees of the do-it-or-else school of diabetes care, and it’s a totally foreign way of thinking about eating.

Real Soba

The traditional recipe for fresh-made soba or buckwheat noodles contains…no salt. At all. Contrast that with any of the store-bought brands here in the U.S. It also has a lot more buckwheat than the store-bought types, using a ni-hachi (2:8) proportion of wheat to buckwheat, so it probably has a lot more buckwheat flavor. Worth a try, especially with some flavorful dipping sauces that don’t lean too heavily on salt and sugar for satisfaction.