Category Archives: Pasta

Sick soup

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Clearly the past week did not go as planned. No Bittman posts appeared here, and no new recipes were made. Until today at lunch.

I don’t get sick very often. When I do, it’s usually a head cold that lasts mayyyyybe three or four days until I get frustrated with it and flood myself with so much liquid that the cold just gets flushed right out of me. This week was different. I don’t know whether this thing that hit me was cold or flu, but it knocked me over, dragged me around for a while, and then pummeled me almost senseless.

My wonderful husband has been nursing me on simple, nutritious dinners and generally keeping me out of the kitchen, which has been a strange experience. But as this morning wound to a close, with husband and dog-daughter out on a walk, I was suddenly struck with a craving for – of all things – Cup’o’noodle soup. You know, the kind in the styrofoam cup with the peel-back paper top, packed with noodles and freeze-dried vegetables and crusty little shrimp? Yeah, I wanted that for the first time in probably ten years. Maybe more.

Of course we don’t have Cup’o’noodle in the house. But we did have frozen turkey broth, made from the carcass of our Thanksgiving turkey. And I had the memory of my friend M.’s suggestion for “garlic tea” as a cold remedy. I went to work in slow, hobbling steps.

In a pot, I put:

3 cups turkey broth (shlooped out of a freezer container in one icy cylinder)

6-10 cloves of garlic, well smashed

2-inch knob of ginger

½ tsp red chili flakes

I turned the heat up and let this come to a boil, where I left it rolling for about 10 minutes to let the garlic and ginger flavors really permeate the broth.*  Then I added:

1 cup loosely packed torn kale leaves

1-2 TB soy sauce

¼ lemon (I squeezed out the juice and then added the wedge of lemon as well)

½ cup Trader Joe’s harvest blend (Israeli couscous, split peas, red quinoa, and orzo)

I let this simmer away for 10-15 minutes, until the kale was wilted and the grains were cooked.

Then I ate the whole pot. 

It was delicious. It wasn’t the over-salted, noodle-y guilty-awesome of Cup’o’noodle, but it was comforting and satisfying and spicy and rich and felt healthy. The lemon juice added a necessary brightness, and the grains blend made it filling enough for lunch. The garlic, the ginger and the chili flakes all have their own kind of spiciness, and all were welcome and throat-soothing and tummy-warming.

If you’re not feeling well (or even if you are!), make yourself a pot of this. To bulk it up, add more grains, or sub that out for noodles, or add some pre-cooked shredded chicken or squares of tofu. If you don’t like kale, add some spinach in the last five minutes instead. Using vegetable broth would easily make this vegetarian and vegan, and using tofu or rice noodles instead of the grains blend would easily make this gluten-free.

 

* At this point, you could strain out the garlic and ginger, and add the vegetables and grains to a clear broth. I didn’t, but then again, I’m the sicko.

Dancing in the Kitchen with Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef

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Shauna and Danny Ahern are my friends.  I don’t know them, we’ve never met, and though I read Shauna’s blog Gluten-Free Girl with a dedication that trips along the border between religious devotion and obsessive-compulsive disorder, I doubt she has ever glanced at mine.  I have drooled over the food (and made some of it!), I have laughed at her triumphs, I have felt my biological clock chime when she speaks of her daughter.  In late July, I sat on my sofa with tears streaming down my face, choking for breath as I read the beautiful story of her wedding.  As a writer myself, I admire her style, her skill with words, and her ability to talk lovingly, richly, thoughtfully about food, about family, about opportunity and love.  I feel like I know these people.  I wish I really did.

A few weeks ago, Shauna announced that along with the forthcoming publication of the cookbook/love story she and Danny “the Chef” wrote together (Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef: A Love Story with 100 Tempting Recipes, listed on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Gluten-Free-Girl-Shauna-James-Ahern/dp/0470419717), they were willing to share three preview recipes with interested parties.  I was, of course, one of these, and in a flurried email exchange, I suddenly had three brilliant recipes, replete with stories, to dance to in my little kitchen.

I ended up only making two of the three, mostly because N. doesn’t like shrimp, so a plate of seared prawns in almond garlic sauce did not sound appealing to him.  But if everything in the cookbook is as stellar in flavor and straightforward in instructions as the two recipes I did conquer over as many days, everyone should own a copy of this book, whether you eat gluten-free or not.

Friday night N. and I went to a last-hurrah-of-summer-bbq at the home of J., my birthday twin, and his partner HP.  Troubled by the notion of bringing the chocolate cake again (I’ve made it several times this summer already), I cast about mentally for another idea, and there was the pdf recipe for GFG’s chocolate peanut butter brownies.  My mouth started to moisten.  Chocolate, butter, sugar, peanut butter, and my first experimentation with xantham gum?  Yes, thank you, I think I will!

As brownies go, it was a fairly standard procedure of careful melting, mixing, swirling, baking, but oh the delight of tasting!  In the short section about the recipe preceding the ingredient list, the words “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup” appear.  They aren’t kidding.  With the peanut butter swirled gently into the deep chocolate batter (and there is no other word for the color than that: chocolate) and my fingers cautiously tasting stray blobs of batter, I wanted to stop and eat the batter.  Half of it would bake up just as nicely as the whole pan, right?

I resisted, and slipped the dish into the oven, relinquishing it from sight for half an hour.  Still tasting the batter, I could detect a slight grainy texture that I attributed to the alternative flours used (my previous experimentations with gluten-free flours have not always been great, but they have always been grainy), so I was a little worried about that.  But after the pan cooked, cooled, and came to the party with me, my concern lifted.  I wouldn’t have had to tell anyone these brownies were gluten-free.  I wanted to, because I must admit I wanted to brag a bit about participating in this project (and get the word out there!), but there was no explaining to do.

Oh Shauna.  Oh Danny.  The taste!  The crumb was rich and moist, the pockets of peanut butter were sticky bombs of candy-like delight.  I couldn’t even get a photo in before the hordes descended on the pan.  Seven people decimated ¾ of the pan in ten minutes.  Almost everyone went back for seconds.  Ever thoughtful of my not-so-narrow waistline (and hips, and thighs, and butt), I generally try to leave leftovers at other people’s houses when I choose dessert as my contribution to a meal.  Not this time.  The remaining brownies came with me, clasped tightly on my lap as we drove home in the rain.

Saturday, I ventured out into the weather again to pick up a few last ingredients for my second dance with Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef; it’s hard to make a pasta dish containing lemons, olives, anchovies and pine nuts when you don’t have lemons or pine nuts in your kitchen.  I grumped to myself as I walked to the store and back.  Why did I need this stuff?  I knew I shouldn’t, but it would just be easier to substitute ingredients.  The brownies had been good (liar, understatement of the century!), but this was just pasta.  I could post about the brownies and leave it at that…

I was so wrong.  With water for brown rice pasta considering coming to a boil, I prepped ingredients and tried to imagine what this was going to taste like.  N. had already been frightened by the idea of anchovies, and I knew he was envisioning a cheap pizza draped with little fishy bodies.  I told him that Shauna and Danny said not to be afraid.  He said “hmph,” which meant he was unconvinced.  He doesn’t know Shauna and Danny like I do.

With the toasty, nutty perfume of not-quite-burned pine nuts still lingering in the kitchen, I sautéed a collection of vegetables in my biggest skillet, hurriedly chopping and slicing in between stirring sessions.  I’m always too anxious to cook to bother readying all my mise en place before scraping a boardful of ingredients into the pan.  At the point that the roughly chopped mix of olives I’d kept stowed in the back of my fridge and the finely chopped little fillets of anchovy hit the pan, I felt my knees buckle.  The smell was incredible.  When I added capers and lemon juice, I had a Proustian epiphany of Corsica, of Greece, of Spain.  Except I’ve never been to Spain.  Or Corsica.  Or anywhere in Greece.  It was just a strong enough, rich enough, delicious enough smell that it lifted me from the stained hardwood floor of my kitchen and transported me onto some magical different plane of Mediterranean glory.

Carefully twirling the pasta through sauce, I had to be careful not to drool on it.  These flavors: is this umami?  It was almost more than I could manage to mix in pine nuts, lemon zest, a clumsy chiffonade of basil – I just wanted to eat it straight out of the skillet.

We sat down to eat.  I tried to do one of those perfect forkfuls where you get a tiny sample of everything.  I tried to think objectively about what I was about to experience, about what vocabulary I would use to describe it, about how I could speak like a food critic about it.  I don’t know how.  Here are my words, all I can manage: earthy.  Warm.  Salty-bright-tangy-acidic-perfect.  Briny.  Tart.  Meltingly rich.  Flavor bomb.  Somewhat reminiscent of chicken piccata, but deeper, richer, earthier, nuttier.

And N.?  He scraped his plate.  I asked him what he thought so I could make a report.  “It was excellent.”  As I’ve written before, N. is generally restrained in his verbal praise of food.  And this was “excellent.”

I’ve never bought anchovies before.  I might never allow them out of my pantry again.  This recipe, whether we use gluten-free pasta or not, will fast become one of my staples.  For me, it’s too distinctive to have all the time.  It’s too special.  But for those nights when I need something powerful to wake my taste buds, when I need something that makes my mouth feel alive, this is it.  This was like eating a tango.

Go to a bookstore.  Order Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef: A Love Story with 100 Tempting Recipes.  Rejoice in the story and in the recipes and in the wonderful opportunity to eat really, really good food.  Dance in your kitchen.  And then tell me about it.  And tell Shauna.  I know she’d want to know.

Seattle: Day One

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As the end of my first year of marriage to N. approached, we decided that instead of gifts, our anniversary treats to ourselves (and each other) would be brief trips to see or do something fantastic.  Our first wedding anniversary, we saw Eddie Izzard live in Portland.  It was fantastic.  Then we went to the zoo.  Our second year, we saw Macbeth in Ashland, then went to Crater Lake.  Again, fantastic.  This year, we outdid ourselves a bit and spent a few days in Seattle (again, ending the trip with the zoo… I have a weak spot for zoos…).

I write this here because we took this opportunity not only to see the sights, but to taste them.  Seattle has a bit of a reputation for being a foodie haunt, and we decided if we were treating ourselves to the voyage, we might as well… well… eat well… during it.  I sent out a call for suggestions and my friend S. responded with an impressive list of possibilities, so what I’ll present to you here are our highlights of Seattle in food.

After lunch on the road (smoked mozzarella sandwich at the McMenamin’s in Centralia, which unexpectedly came free because our server forgot to put in our order and consequently comped our whole lunch), we set foot in Seattle in mid-afternoon with plenty of time to sightsee a bit before dinner.  We planned our evening at the top of the Space Needle, and ended up deciding on Oddfellows Café and Bar.  The space was great: open and airy with lots of exposed wood ceiling beams, and one old, mellow brick wall.   It’s close to the campus of Seattle Central Community College, and we could feel the youthful vibe of the place in the décor and the demeanor of our fellow diners.  Our server had probably finished up classes an hour or two before serving us dinner.

And what a dinner!  We started off with drinks, since it had been a long drive.  N. had a local porter, and I had pear cider.

The menu was simple and clean, and though at first I was a bit disappointed by the small number of entrée choices, it only took me the first two lines on the menu to decide what I was having and to guess (accurately) what N. would order.

I had the rotolo, a beautiful rolled pasta, like conchiglioni mated with lasagna, lovingly topped with a blanket of this beautiful tangy, sweet, slightly acidic tomato sauce.  The pasta itself was stuffed, rolled, sliced and flipped on its side to expose its creamy filling to the eye.  It was filled with a mixture of spinach and ricotta cheese, with a light herbiness I haven’t figured out yet.  Oregano, maybe, and perhaps chives.  Though we had agreed upon ordering, I was almost unwilling to hand my plate across the table to share. 

But it’s good to share.  Really, really good.  N. ordered the roasted chicken with summer vegetables, and when it came, almost half a chicken, I knew how good this would be.  With N. a white meat man and me a dark meat fan, he would take a nibble of the thigh, consume the breast, and gladly pass along the rich leg to me.  The chicken was very simply roasted, hot and juicy with crisp brown skin and perfect saltiness.  Really a sexy lady all around.  The meat was tender and rich, and as our knives took turns plunging into the flesh, little rivulets of fat trickled across the plate into the vegetables on the other side, which became the unexpected superstars of the dinner experience.

“Summer vegetables,” in this case, meant a mélange of green beans and thick medallions of green and yellow zucchini.  They were crisp tender and lovingly coated in lemony buttery perfection.  Crunchy, citrusy, peppery, and with the addition of the chicken fat mixing in, perfectly indulgent too.

We passed on dessert this evening, but only because we didn’t want to overdo it on the first night…

Cheese and macaroni

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I pride myself a bit on escaping from some of the pressures and temptations of processed food. I like to cook, I like homemade food, and I like when my shelves are full of whole ingredients and natural products and grains and all that snobby stuff. If I can (relatively) easily make it from scratch, I try not to buy it premade.

But there are always exceptions, and sometimes they are the very worst kind. You see, most of my life I have hated all but one variety of macaroni and cheese. My mom’s elbow noodles in cheesy bechamel with bread crumbs on top? Can’t stand it. The crunchy baked roasting hot steaming vessel-o-mac from Cornucopia, one of our go-tos? Merely tolerable. But that kind that comes in a blue box? That kind with the chewy, rubbery noodles and toxic neon orange powdery “cheese”? Oh god, I love it. I wait till it’s 10 for $10 at the grocery store and stock up. Sometimes I peek into the back of my cupboard just to check that I have a box or two stockpiled there. I’m not ashamed.

And yet… and yet I always feel like I’m missing something. There must be an element of worth to homemade mac and cheese. People love it! Our friend X is practically a connoisseur. I finally decided I, not the mac, must be the problem. I love pasta with cheese on it, I love fettuccine alfredo, so where, I asked myself, did the problem arise?

In the sauce.

The closest I’ve come to enjoying a bowl of homemade, baked macaroni was a version in which the sauce was made of (as near as I could tell) two things: butter and cheese. It’s the white sauce I apparently take issue with. Thick and creamy but bland, with all the graininess of melted cheese but only 50% of the flavor. Ever notice how a chocolate milkshake has only the palest color and flavor of chocolate compared to a big scoop of rich, fudgy ice cream? Cheese sauce seems to do the same thing to cheese.

So the natural solution seemed to me to tinker around in my kitchen, producing numerous casseroles of ever increasing cheesiness, until I found a ratio I (gasp!) actually enjoyed. Perversely, however, given my strange penchant of creating and serving new food to friends and family without testing it first, I decided to make macaroni and cheese for my in-laws during our visit to their home.

I don’t know what made me think of it. I don’t know what made me decide it was a good idea. But suddenly, there I was in the tiny grocery store in their little town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, buying cheese and elbow noodles and Panko breadcrumbs. Baby, I was makin’ mac’n’cheese.

I must admit to borrowing a bit from Pioneer Woman’s recipe, but I made a few alterations of my own. Here’s the rundown of ingredients, some approximated:

1 pound elbow noodles (1 16oz. box)

¼ cup butter (½ a stick)

¼ cup flour

2 tsp spicy brown mustard

2 cups milk, room temperature

1 egg, beaten, room temperature

garlic salt

black pepper

3-4 cups cheese? I used an 8oz. block of sharp cheddar, 2 generous handfuls of parmesan, and some already grated leftover medium cheddar stowed in the fridge.

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

Topping:

2 TB butter

½ cup Panko breadcrumbs

2 TB parmesan

2-3 TB sharp cheddar

  • Cook the noodles in boiling water until almost done. They should still be a little underdone on the inside, because they are going to continue to cook when we bake them. Drain well and set them aside until we call for them.
  • Melt the butter in a large pot or pan over medium to medium-high heat. As it melts, add the flour and stir in, making a smooth golden paste. This is a roux.
  • After letting the roux cook for a minute or two, watching it carefully and stirring frequently so it doesn’t burn, add the mustard. As Pioneer Woman said, this adds a really nice but not recognizable tang to the finished dish.
  • Begin adding the milk gradually. I probably added in three or four additions. Stir or whisk well after each addition of milk, until the mixture is smooth and does not have big lumps of flour. When all the milk is added, let it cook, stirring occasionally, for about five minutes until it starts to emit heavy reluctant bubbles and becomes quite thick and rich. Turn the heat down to low. This is a bechamel, or basic white sauce.
  • Slowly, stirring constantly, add about ¼ cup of the bechamel to the beaten egg. This is tempering, which starts the egg cooking slowly so it mixes in smoothly in liquid form. If you just tipped the egg into the sauce hot on the stovetop, it would scramble and leave little eggy bits in your smooth wonderful mixture. After tempering, add the egg and sauce mixture, now warmed and safe, back into the bechamel. Season to taste. I used garlic salt and seasoned pepper, because that’s what I found in my mother in-law’s spice cupboard.
  • Add the cheese in handfuls, stirring until each addition is melted before adding the next. This way your sauce doesn’t get overwhelmed with clumps of cheese, and if you decide it is cheesy enough without the whole amount, you can stop where you like. I wanted it to start to get stringy and clingy, as the cheese overwhelms the milk completely.
  • Add the parsley and the cooked, drained noodles. Stir to combine.
  • Pour the sticky cheesy mixture into a buttered 2 quart casserole dish and load it up with the topping (procedure follows), then bake in a preheated 350F oven for about 30 minutes, or until the edges are bubbling up from the bottom and the topping has become relentlessly golden and crisp. Eat.

To make the topping,

  • Pinch about two TB of butter into pieces in a bowl.
  • Add the bread crumbs, parmesan, and cheddar and mix together as you would a streusel for a crisp. You want small chunky pieces, and you want the cheeses and crumbs to be evenly distributed. This makes a lot for a casserole dish of macaroni, but N. really loves a crunchy topping so I always add a little more than, perhaps, the average person would. Adjust to your tastes.

When the topping was taking on a burnished shade and the combination of butter from the sides of the dish and cheese from the sauce was boiling and bursting up around the sides, I liberated our dinner from the oven and we dug into it anxiously, dropping large spoonfuls onto our plates. The noodles had soaked up a lot of the bechamel during their stint in the oven, leaving the decadent suggestion of creaminess but the overwhelming assault of cheesy flavor holding them together. The topping was the perfect combination of sizzling salty crunchy sharpness and, served beside steamed broccoli and whole wheat focaccia, I must admit, I liked it. I went back for seconds. I had it for lunch the next day. Forget macaroni and cheese. Give me, for the rest of time, cheese with macaroni.

Re-envision Whirled Peas!

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Last week I wrote about an appetizer I made with pureed peas.  I wasn’t thrilled with it, but thought it was a good base for… something else.  This week I present you with the modified version, and one of my mottos for green produce of all kinds: when all else fails, make pesto.

I smashed, peeled, and blitzed three cloves of garlic in my food processor along with a handful each of basil and parsley.  Straight from the fridge, I scraped the leftover pea puree, now a humble new beginning, back into the food processor.  In went a few tablespoons of lime juice, a few heaping tablespoons of Parmesan cheese, and a judicious helping of freshly ground black pepper.

Whirl.

Taste.

It was tangy and herby, but still had the sweetness of peas and the cutting, intriguing coolness of spearmint from the original concoction.  I liked it.  If I hadn’t been feeling lazy, I might have added some toasted walnuts or even almonds.  But I was, and so alas, laziness ruled the day.

Fortunately, laziness did not keep me from slipping a log of goat cheese into the freezer, a box of curlicue pasta into a pot of violently boiling water, and a few slices of sourdough, nicely oiled, salted, and peppered, under the broiler.

It’s summer here, but the smells of this Franken-pesto as it hit the steaming hot curls of chewy-soft pasta were the kind of April and May I wish we’d had.  Warm, fresh, sharp but sweet.

We grated the chilly goat cheese over the top – when it’s almost frozen, it becomes like any other hard cheese – and as a coup de grace, added chopped snap peas to the top.  Pinched from the plant, rinsed, sliced on a bias.  Almost carelessly thrown onto the mound of snowy cheese and grassy sauce.  Another garden.

Yum.  Welcome, summer.  I embrace your call for simplicity, for freshness, for inventive dishes.  I will try to do you justice.

Post-partum parcels of joy

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After passing my exam a couple weeks ago, I went and spoke with my adviser to find out what I should be doing to keep on track.  She told me to rest.  Rest!  Actual, warranted permission to lie around, to catch up on terrible reality television series, to take naps and sleep in, uninterrupted by guilt about conferences, articles or (gulp) the dissertation!
Of course this didn’t last long.  Like any kid after the first few weeks of summer vacation, I got bored.  So I turned to the kitchen, as usual, to vent my new creative focus.  I spent my weekend on a few special projects.  As I’ve mentioned before, it has become something of a hobby of mine to “collect” menu descriptions from restaurants and try to recreate them.  On this occasion, I didn’t even have to do that much guesswork.
Pasta Piatti in Ashland is a favorite of mine, and I’ve mentioned it before.  When N. and I had dinner there in celebration of our second wedding anniversary this past summer, I had their butternut squash ravioli in a brown butter sauce with sage, crumbled biscotti cookies, and “Oregonzola” cheese from Rogue Creamery.  It looked like this:

Gloriously, the restaurant posts recipes for some of their dishes on their website, and the filling for their extravagantly delicious squash ravioli is one of them.  Make this at home?  Yes, please.

It’s a process, but I think it’s worth it.  See the recipe for detailed directions, but note that there are a few inconsistencies (i.e. do you food process the onion along with the squash and garlic, or just fold it in?).  It took about an hour for the squash to cook and the garlic to soften and fill the house with its sweet buttery aroma.  I processed together the squash, garlic, sauteed onion (though I used shallot), and egg yolks, but folded in the cheeses so they wouldn’t melt or gum up the blades of my food processor.
When the filling is cooled, you can address containment.  Though you could certainly make your own fresh pasta, or maybe even stuff large shells or manicotti, I addressed a package of square wonton wrappers.

Made from wheat flour and fairly flexible, wonton wrappers are a good, easy substitute for fresh pasta.  I loaded up each square with about ½ a tablespoon of filling, wet the edges, and folded them into semi-clean, somewhat isosceles triangles.  How that word survived in the memory banks astounds me.  Geometry was a long time ago.  After spreading the little packages on a well floured cookie sheet, I stowed them in the refrigerator for an hour or so to let the seal set while I got everything else ready.  With water heating on the back burner to boil my squash-stuffed parcels, I readied the rest of the arsenal:

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
2 TB fresh sage, minced or in chiffonade
½ – 1 cup graham cracker crust crumble (recipe follows)
2 oz. Oregonzola cheese, crumbled (or any gorgonzola or mild blue cheese)
salt and pepper to taste

1.  During a downtime in the cooking process (either while the butternut squash and garlic are roasting or as the ravioli are cooling down in the refrigerator), mix together about a cup of graham cracker crust with 2 TB brown sugar and 2 TB melted butter.  Spread the mixture on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet and bake at 325 or 350 until deep golden brown and crumbly.  Crumble up and cool.  Pasta Piatti uses crumbled almond biscotti.  I just used what I had in my pantry and it worked out very well.
2.  While you wait for the water to boil for the raviolis, melt the butter in a large pan over medium heat.  When foam subsides, the butter will begin to turn a deep gold and then brown.  As it moves from gold to brown, toss in the sage and allow it to fry until almost crisp; crunchy little shards of herbage.  You may at this point have to turn down the heat so the butter will not burn while the ravioli cook.
3.  The ravioli will only need 3-4 minutes to cook in rapidly simmering, salted water.  I let the water cool from a rolling boil before dropping them in a few at a time because I wasn’t sure how well sealed they were, and I wanted to forestall explosions or leaking.  I was mostly successful.  When they float to the top of the pot, scoop them out with a strainer or a slotted spoon and deposit them carefully into the butter sauce, draining off as much water as possible before adding them to the skillet.
4.  When all raviolis have joined the dark golden buttery bath, fold them gently into the sauce and add the cookie and cheese crumbles.  Mix again gently and serve with bread and salad.

We had a ciabatta loaf from Trader Joe’s and a salad of romaine, arugula, thinly sliced Granny Smith apple, pomegranate seeds, and walnut halves as a side.  I made a quick dressing from finely diced shallot and sage, with honey, white wine vinegar, and mayonnaise.  Thanks to an impromptu Trader Joe’s trip for the gorgonzola cheese, the pomegranate seeds and the ciabatta, I was able to pair dinner with a TJ’s special: Green Fin white table wine.  This is made from organic grapes, which supposedly eliminate some of the problems caused by tannins (headache, bad hangover), but also tastes delicious.  It’s a bit on the sweet side, which seems good for this meal; the sweetness of the butternut squash and the cookie crumbs in the sauce offers the peril of bitterness to an ordinarily lovely white wine.

But let’s get on to the important bit: the ravioli.  The filling is soft and luscious, since it has been blended, and the wonton wrappers are so delicate after their boiling bath that they almost dissolve on your tongue.  With a whole head of roasted garlic in the mix, you might expect a stronger garlic flavor, but because it is roasted it just melts into the background as a sweet, mellow support for the squash.  Sage and squash are a natural pairing, and the herb adds a little freshness to the nutty, almost caramel notes of the brown butter.  These flavors all blend so well, but the real glory of the dish in my mind is in the contrasting crumbles.  The cookies and the cheese are such opposites in flavor and in texture; the cookies are crisp and sweet-crunchy, even after a dunk in butter, while the cheese maintains its structural integrity for a while as the dish cools on your plate (ahem, it would, if the dish had long enough to cool on your plate before you devoured every last bit) and provides a creamy, slightly chewy counterpoint.  Since gorgonzola is not terribly sweet and, in fact, has its own definitive funk to it in flavor and in aroma, it coats your palate a bit, protecting it from the potentially overwhelming sweetness of the squash, the butter, the cookies.
This is a beautiful dinner.  It would also make a rich, out-of-the-ordinary dessert, and an unconventional but satisfying breakfast.  But we didn’t leave enough for all that…