Fusilli Amatriciana

Last night I had dinner with a friend. Not just any friend. An old, dear friend. One of those rare people in life with whom you find that even though well over a decade has passed since the last time you saw them you know that you will share a hug that feeds your soul. Time will revert to a place where it feels like you saw them only days ago and the conversation is easy and comfortable. I can count the people in my life that fall into this category on one hand, with digits to spare. And while these are the ones I want most to cook for (it’s how I show my love) I want the time to be focused on catching up and reconnecting and not in the kitchen wrapped up in some complicated recipe. Also, from what I remembered he was always more of a burger and fries, no frills kinda guy. I wanted dinner to be simple and low-key in respect of that.

Pasta Amatriciana is the perfect meal for such an occasion. It is barely more complicated than your basic marinara sauce. (Sidenote: While on the topic of marinara, I know there are multitudes of people who are of the school of thought that sauce needs to simmer for hours or days or millenia or what have you. Nothing could really be further from the truth. Marinara is a quick sauce. Garlic, basil and raw tomato in my book. That’s it. I’m a purist, what can I say.)

Amatraciana is named after the town of Amatrice in Abruzzo, Italy and classically served with buccatini (hollow spaghetti) pasta. It would traditionally be made with guincale(cheek)or prosciutto(belly) or some other un-smoked type of Italian bacon. I live in the States and I like American bacon, applewood smoked if I’m feeling crazy. I try to buy the bulk, end pieces for this since I want lardons of bacon. That’s french for meaty chunks.

Aside from being simple and a perfect comfort dish, this only uses two pans. One for the pasta, one for the sauce. Less dishes = more time to talk your face off.

GET THIS:

• 1 large yellow onion, sliced into half moons
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1/2 lb thick cut bacon, sliced or cubed
• 1 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
• 2 Tbs. Olive oil
• 1 28 oz can crushed tomato

DO THIS:

Render(**) bacon and soften onions in olive oil over low/meduim heat in a large skllet. When bacon is browned and onions are very pliable and soft (about 15-20 mins.) add the garlic and chili flakes and cook for two minutes. Add tomato and cook 5 mins. Season with salt and pepper and toss with your pasta of choice. I used a brown rice, wheat-free fusilli (no one was the wiser) but whatever you have hangin’ out in the pantry is good.
If you happen to have a few sprigs of fresh thyme kickin’ around I’d add those at the same time as the garlic. And of course, finish with a smattering of chopped fresh flat leaf parsely and some grated Italian cheese if you’ve got it.

**There are two basic methods of cooking bacon. Browning and rendering. Browning, or frying, uses higher heat; either direct(stovetop) or indirect(oven). This quickly cooks the bacon resulting in crispy, crunchy stand-alone bacon-ey goodness. Rendering uses a lower heat to literally melt the fat and infuse whatever the end product will be (soup, sauce, dressing) with a concentrated, smoky bacon flavor and yields smaller bits of the leftover protein.

A few words from one our friends…

Today’s post comes to you in the form of a guest blog from my friend Marisa Fanelli, owner of Healing Point Therapeutics in Wayland, MA. Marisa has recently discovered the many benefits of juicing. Something I have not quite dabbled with myself even though we have the exact same juicer in the house and I have several friends and family members that swear by it. Maybe this is a sign that today is the day I should start pressing my fruits and vegetables through the machine. Or maybe I should just make some fudge instead…I’ll keep ya posted.

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 As an acupuncturist, I try to steer my patients in the right direction when it comes to diet.  However, I don’t push.  It’s important to me to have my patients feel comfortable admitting their guilty pleasures without feeling judged.  In fact, several patients have commented on how grateful they are to be able to tell me anything without fear of disapproval.  You might have to bow your head in shame while discussing your love of cheese with your physician, but in my office? Bring it on.  Honesty is the best policy, and who among us can be completely honest when they know they are going to be admonished for it?

   It’s also easy for me to commiserate with my patient’s lack of willpower, because my own hedonistic tendencies win out so often.  Who am I to judge, when patients can probably still smell the truffle oil from my breakfast omelette?  I love chocolate, and cheese, and wine…oh, how I love wine.  I could never take that away from someone else, when it brings me so much pleasure.  The key, of course, is moderation.  Two glasses of wine is fine; two bottles are not.  We can live our lives depriving ourselves of everything unhealthy, but is that really living?

   I have always struggled with maintaining a healthy, balanced diet.  In all honesty, I’d be happy living on nothing but protein and carbs.  Give me some meat and bread, and I’m perfectly content.  Since I realize that I need more, I force myself to be more inclusive in my diet.  Each week, I buy plenty of organic fruits and vegetables.  And each week, they first take up space, and then rot in my refrigerator.  Although I am aware that I would feel better incorporating fresh vitamins into my daily routine, all my will drains away by the time I have put my groceries away.

   Don’t get me wrong: I do enjoy some fruits and veggies.  I love apples and cherries…when they’re baked into a pie, and topped with ice cream.  Spinach can be so delicious when it is creamed and served with steak.  And I even enjoy the occasional carrot (cake).  But I would never think of biting into a fresh apple, or peeling an orange for a snack.  I simply have no interest.

   I remember visiting my parents a few years ago and getting annoyed at their attempts to foist their garden pickings on me.  My mother had bags and bags of eggplant, tomatoes, and zucchini, all plump and still warm from the sun.  As she piled up bags for me to take home, I protested, “All of this is just going to rot in my fridge!  Why are you giving it to me when you know I won’t eat it?”

    “But these tomatoes taste like pure sugar!” my mom said.  ”Just try them!”

    Fast forward to a few weeks later: My refrigerator was now filled with softly rotting tomatoes, and there were fruitflies everywhere.  As I mopped up stinking tomato sludge from the veggie drawer, I vowed to never accept unwanted gifts of produce again.

    Yet, still, I tried.  I bought things that I kind of liked, a little.  At least, I liked them enough to force them down my throat without gagging.  I have tried buying food that are wildly overpriced, just to guilt myself into eating them.  I’ve also had times where I only bought fruits and veggies, hoping that I would get desperate enough to eat them.  Nothing worked.  I had resigned myself to a produce-free existence when, one day, I woke up with an idea.

    I was spending all this time trying to trick myself into eating certain foods, due to my distaste.  Why not just admit that I hated these foods, and try to work them into my diet in a different way?  I would drink disgusting protein powder drinks for breakfast, and it was easy, because I could just pour them down my throat without thinking about it.  What if I could do the same with my fruits and vegetables?

   When I get an idea in my head, I need to get on it immediately.  That morning, I drove straight to the mall and headed into my happy place:  Crate and Barrel.  I asked the saleswoman for to find me a juicer that was designed for the lazy and stupid.  I wanted something that had no steps, no cleanup, and no instructions.  In short, I wanted a magic juicer.

    Five minutes later, I found my magic juicer:  The Breville Compact Juice Extractor.  ”I’m sure you’re not stupid,” my saleswoman said as she rang me up, “but even if you are, you’ll still be able to use this.  It is sooo easy, I promise.”

    In celebration of my new find, I stopped at the grocery store and picked up several items to juice.  I was like a kid at Christmas.  Part of me was excited to play with my new toy, yet I also feared disappointment.  What if I had to core and peel things?  I knew that was way too much work for me.

    As it turned out, I had nothing to worry about.  I christened my Breville with a whole apple, and was rewarded with about 4 ounces of juice in less than 3 seconds.  Inspired, I tossed in a carrot, then a beet.  Holy crap, this thing was amazing!  In less than 30 seconds, I had juiced 7 large fruits and vegetables.  I tentatively tasted my creation.  It tasted like a glass of apple cider, which I actually like.  I had images of all the fresh fruit cocktails I could now make dancing in my head.  This was unreal.

    And the best part?  I saw a HUGE difference in my energy levels once I started juicing daily.  One day, I realized that I hadn’t had coffee in a week, yet I felt kind of buzzed with caffeine.  My mind was alert and ready to go; my heart even felt a bit speedy, but in a good way.  I went to the gym and worked out at the same level I normally did, yet it seemed too easy for me, and I had to increase my speed and intensity on every machine.  ”What the hell?” I thought….and then it hit me.  This was what healthy people felt like!

How Eastern Medicine Changed My Life in Ten Minutes

In the past few years I’ve become pretty empassioned about the correlation between our food supply and our health as a nation. A few weeks ago my dear friend Marisa, of Healing Point Therapeutics in Wayland, Massachusetts, asked if I would be interested in writing a Guest Blog entry for her Blog, Balancing Point. Marisa is an acupuncturist and I credit her with not just being a superb practitioner but playing a key role in helping me to uncover some health problems I had been suffering from a few years ago by introducing me to the world of Eastern Medicine, specifically acupuncture. I was thrilled to be able to share my story with her readers and am looking forward to being able to return the favor and have her spotlight as a Guest Blogger here on Nomapotamus sometime in the very near future. I am re-posting the entry here for you to read but if you are interested in learning more about how acupuncture works, what it can do for you or happen to be in the Greater Boston Area and are looking for a practitioner I highly recommend checking out her website!

How Eastern Medicine Changed My Life in Ten Minutes

originally posted on Balancing Point Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Around the summer of 2007 I began noticing some changes in my health and the way I felt on a day to day basis. At first I thought I was just getting older. I was approaching thirty and I had always heard people talk about how your thirties are the time when you begin to develop real health issues and things start to decline a bit. Joints, metabolism, energy levels, etc. So I brushed off the symptoms as being a normal part of the aging process and continued on. Unfortunately over the next few months I became increasingly tired to the point of lethargy. I would spend my days off lying in bed till the late afternoon only to forcibly drag myself up and out of the house in order to accomplish whatever things I simply couldn’t justify putting off. I lived on the second floor and I began to dread going up and down the stairs because my feet were so tender. I was constantly on the search for new shoes thinking I just needed to find the right, comfortable pair. God forbid I had to put on a pair of heels. When the pain and tenderness started presenting in just about every other joint in my body and my hands became unclenchable I knew it was time to see a Dr. If I couldn’t hold a razor to shave my legs on certain days or put a pair of earrings in there must be something wrong, right?

I had done a bit of self-diagnosing on the internet and was prepared for the worst when I finally got an appointment with a rheumatologist. She didn’t say it right away, but I knew what she was thinking, I told myself; Rheumatoid Arthritis. The debilitating, degenerative autoimmune disorder that could basically destroy my life. Dramatic, yes, but you know how your head gets away with you when you spend too much time on Web-MD.

I was tested and had been ruled out for RA (THANK GOD!) but over the next three years I saw several different doctors, had numerous blood panels and had been prescribed more prescription NSAID’s that I can remember trying to manage the pain and inflammation. By that time I had a perpetual low grade fever, chronic joint pain, gastro-intestinal disorders that I didn’t even realize until later were abnormal because I had become so accustomed to them and this bloated feeling that no matter how much water I drank or how much dieting I did never seemed to go away. I looked pregnant on my worst days and just plain round on a good one. I was tested for everything that could possibly cause one or more of my symptoms: Lupus, Lyme’s Disease, Fibromyalgia, RA, Chron’s Disease, Grave’s Disease and a host of other autoimmune disorders that I’m sure I’m forgetting. They all came up negative and there was nothing to do but treat the pain. The only problem was that none of these medicines ever worked for more than a few weeks. Which resulted in my rotating through as many of the drugs as I could until I just settled into the cheap regiment of a high dose of naproxen sodium (Aleve) every day. It was the only thing that seemed to work longer than a month. The only problem was that with longterm use of naproxen comes stomach and/or esophageal ulcers, possible kidney damage, possible hearing loss, dizziness, excessive sweating. I managed almost two years on it before I began to develop the esophageal ulcer and realized it was absolutely imperative that I find out what was going on once and for all.

I had known Marisa throughout her acupuncture schooling and she had encouraged me several times to use acupuncture as a means of pain relief. I did, off and on, and it always helped alleviate some of the discomfort and seemed to balance things out for a while. Inevitably the issues returned but it was more effective than anything else and seemed to center and calm me enough to make it a little easier to deal with the frustration of feeling like an eighty year old, day in and day out. I also had a friend who swore by his practitioner in helping with his chronic neck pain. So I booked an appointment to start treatment thinking I would just go a few times a week to deal with the pain since I could no longer take any drugs.

On my first visit I sat down in Dr. Axman’s office and filled out the intake form. He came in, took a quick glance at it and told me it looked to him like my problem was probably diet related. He consented to treat me for the pain as long as I needed but suggested I try an elimination diet. Two weeks of cutting out a certain food to clear out your system and then adding it back to see how your body reacts to it. He wanted me to try the most common culprits first; wheat gluten, dairy, eggs and soy. On a lark I started with wheat. Within three days I had lost 7 pounds, bloating–check. By day five my stool was normal and the gas and abdominal pain was gone, gastro–check. A week in and my joints were 100% normal and I had NO pain or inflammation. My energy levels soared. And more, my depression, which I had struggled with for years seemed to be waning and not really an issue anymore. Could it be possible that gluten was causing not just my physical problems but my psychological ones as well? You bet it was.

I had been stuck in this spiral that reminded me of an Albert Einstein quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results”. With the Western Medicine protocol I was surely doing the same thing over and over again and the outcome was always the same. Nobody knew. No one could help and I felt I was on the verge of insanity. My acupuncturist had figured out inside of ten minutes what was going on with my body using an Eastern approach. By looking for a cause instead of simply shrugging and treating the symptoms. Not to mention the amount of money I had spent on the specialists and medications over that time and now here was someone who was willingly putting himself in a position where if he were right, I wouldn’t even have a need to see him and he wouldn’t be making any money off me at all. Quite the opposite from our Western Medical ideology that really seems to serve to ensnare a patient into a lifetime of doctor’s visits and expensive prescriptions.

It’s been over a year since I was diagnosed Gluten Intolerant and I will admit sometimes I flub and give into the craving for a sandwich or a slice of pizza or birthday cake. When I do, I pay for it, but at least I know what the cause is.
As a food professional I am pretty consumed nowadays with what we have done to our food suppy to create such rampant food allergies. I suspect it has mostly to do with things like preservatives, pesticides, genetically modfied foods and the monocultures of soy, corn and wheat that we have turned our farmlands into. These allergies, intolerants and new diseases are not normal and I expect that over time it will be an Eastern approach that will help identify not just the specific problems but the solutions to the epidemic our current food model has created. Much in the same way my Western doctors could not see the possible origin of my sickness and simply treated me with more medicine, Western scientists seem to ignore the almost obvious reality that our nation’s health is being compromised by the way we are running our food system and the only response they offer, if any, is to use more preservatives and increasing amounts of harmful and systemic pesticides. What if these scientists and doctors were to ask the advice of a farmer from a culture that bases diagnosis on the health of the whole entity? Who acknowledge that if there is an imbalance in one place the entire body (or industry in this case) must be treated? We might find that the future fate of American agriculture could also be changed in ten minutes. Just a thought.

My Kingdom for a Pumkpin (Soup, That is)

While I am loving getting reacquainted with my hometown of Los Angeles I cannot avoid indulging the tug at my heartstrings when I think about fall in New England. Having celebrated more birthdays than I care to mention amidst the crunchy leaves and early snow flurries of mid October it was a bit of a shock to endure ninety degree weather this year when adding another tick to the tally.

The very first day I felt the slightest chill in the air here I rushed out and bought pumkpins of various sizes, shapes and colors to adorn the porch and colorful indian corn to hang on the door much as I would have done in my Connecticut home. I was placated to think that even if I couldn’t be there for the changing foliage and blustery evenings when it starts to get dark earlier and earlier I could at least proclaim my enthusiasm for the harvest season with some festive decoration. What didn’t occur to me was that in the ninety plus degree weather putting fruit outside on the brick steps was the equivalent to baking it in a brick oven. It was less than a week before I had a puddle of pumpkin-ey goop, meaning I had to go out and buy a whole new batch if I wanted to have them out for Halloween, much less Thanksgiving.

I live for Thanksgiving. It has been a longstanding known fact over the years that if anyone ever had no place to go for the holiday then you would be at my house. There would be more food than you would know what to do with and a good time would be had by all. On any given year there would be upwards of twenty-five friends and randoms piled into whatever tiny apartment I was living in at the time. These were seriously the happiest days of my life.

One of my favorite cool weather recipes is also one of the simplest I know. With a mere six ingredients and a total cooking time of maybe twenty minutes, add a loaf of crusty bread and a thick slather of some sweet cream butter and you have the perfect meal for a night when you come home exhausted and don’t feel like dragging out numerous pots and pans — or cleaning them for that matter.

Now I’m usually pretty die hard about making ingredients from scratch but there are a few things that I truly don’t see the need to go all out and make myself. Pumpkin puree is one of them. One of the things you learn in a kitchen is that sometimes a scratch product just isn’t worth the labor involved when the quality of its commercial equivalent is just as good. Our grandparents and great-grandparents canned for a reason and I see no problem in using canned goods as long as they are not loaded with preservatives. (tomatoes and pumpkins, specifically) And I personally find no difference in taste between fresh pumpkin puree and the canned stuff. (Note: I am only talking puree here, not pie filling. Don’t be a schlub and use canned pumpkin pie filling.)

~~How serendipitous that while I was already writing this weeks pumpkin-loving blog entry Kelsey over at http://www.thenaptimechef.com was cooking up a contest giveaway for just such a recipe. You should all head on over and enter to win a King Arthur Halloween Baking Kit (Including some black cocoa powder that looks really awesome!) Details, rules and deadline (As well as a really great recipe for some pumpkin pie fudge that I think I’ll make this evening.) can be found here. ~~

You’ll need a small bermixer for this. (Also called a hand, stick or immersion blender.) You can pick one up for under twenty bucks and you’ll be glad you did. Once you have it you’ll find all kinds of uses for it. It’s a great way to make smoothies in the morning without dirtying up the blender and it’s easy-peasy to clean. You just pop the stick off and wash that. If you don’t have one you can process the soup in your food processor in batches or forego the smoothing process altogether and live with some very small chunks. It’s your call.

Crazy Easy Curried Pumpkin Soup

Get this:

1. 3 cloves garlic, chopped
2. 1 small yellow onion, diced
3. 1 Tbs. Madras curry powder
4. 1 29 oz. can pumpkin puree
5. 4-6 cups chicken stock (Depending on how thick or thin you like your soup.)
6. 1 15 oz. can coconut milk

Do this:

Sweat garlic and onion in about 3 Tbs of whatever fat you like. (butter, vegetable or olive oil)over med/low heat until soft. Add curry powder and stir 1-2 minutes until fragrant and toasty. Add puree and stock, bring to a boil and let simmer 10 minutes. Add coconut milk and bring back to a boil. Adjust salt and pepper to taste. Enjoy.

**Great Garnishes for this: roasted pumpkin seeds, fried onion strings, sage leaves tossed in browned butter, crème fraiche, garlicky croutons.