Thursday, March 27, 2008
While real Italians would never serve spaghetti and meatballs on the same plate, we must sheath our Mediterranean food snobbery in recognition of the fact that it’s a damn tasty dish, no matter how it’s served. It’s a simple dish that we hope becomes part of your repertoire, but like most simple dishes, it is founded on attention to detail. First, find yourself quality tomatoes (you can’t go wrong with anything that says Product of Italy and/or San Marzano on the label). Second, make sure you cook your pasta — and this is imperative — perfectly. This means monitoring your spaghetti as it cooks. Once you hit the 4 minute mark, begin tasting every fifteen seconds. The difference between al dente, blah, and mush is a matter of seconds (and never rinse your pasta — you’ll wash away all that glorious starch).
On the meatball side of things, the ingredients can vary according to taste and indeed, we encourage you to experiment. We like lamb for its intensity, even in small doses, but you could just as easily use pork, veal of beef. The only bit of advice here is to use equal parts bread and meat. Keep in mind, meatballs, or polpetti, were created as a way to stretch leftover ingredients. While our wallets and meatballs may be fatter here in America, nobody likes a dense meat sphere on their plate. Balancing it with bread ensures a light, airy result.
Recipe and follow-along-at-home video after the jump.
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Friday, February 29, 2008
Here in good, old LA, there are two types of days I have: fun and not so much fun. The fun days usually involve going to a meeting or, even better, an interview in some industry stronghold. On these days I feel connected and encouraged. I return home, enthused, and bang out a script, outline or revision. Sometimes the fun days even involve hiking and/or running through pretty wilderness. The fun days also involve sun light and typically end with the preparation of a delicious family meal. The not so much fun days make up the rest of the time in between fun days (and the third kind of day: sensory depravation days spent watching entire seasons of The Wire on DVD). Not so much fun days usually involve me sitting near my phone (even though it’s a cell phone there is still something to be said for the sedentary lifestyle of waiting by the phone) waiting for it to ring. The phone calls I am waiting for are typically the people that I had met with earlier during the fun days. Not so much fun days typically occur on overcast days.
As I type this in my apartment in Los Angeles, the strike is over and done with but even though I’ve been here for over a month, this new post-strike environment is basically like starting over. Starting over in the same way that if you were the kind of person who really enjoyed watching elephants run and you move to Africa to pursue this hobby, and while you’re about to disembark en route to the tusk and trunk laden planes, a bunch of harmless but mischievous poachers pop out and pump the elephants full of tranquilizer darts. So now here you are, with the stub of your one way ticket to Africa getting soggy from your palm sweat (it’s hot in the desert) waiting for the sleeping behemoths to finally wake up and gore the poachers. That’s what things are like right now: waiting for the the industry to kick up some dirt and go charging up to full speed once more, giant, dripping penis flopping about in the arid, dusty wind. Eventually the current television season will collide with pilot season, causing a thundercrack of opportunities (or phrased differently, a solar flare of work, or a human spontaneous combustion of employment). And even now, in the still smoldering wake of the strike, options are beginning to shyly show themselves, like coy elves selling arboreal patchwork to humans on the roadside.
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Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Sometimes you just want to get your starch on. But, being burgeoning civilized men of the world, fries, baked potatoes, and Lay’s are out of the question. What to do? A depthy (a term we are hereby coining) dish of perfectly browned potatoes and vitamin rich kale, the porterhouse of the green leafy vegetable world. A little bit Irish, a little bit Italian, this preparation relies on just a splash of tomato sauce to bring some acidity to the otherwise rich dish. Plus a single (hardy) serving shouldn’t cost you more than about $3. Boom.
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Thursday, February 21, 2008
Editor’s Note: Greg has been contributing to the site for a little while now, building up to the day when he would emerge as a beautiful butterfly…err… columnist. He will be balancing out Chris by providing us with insight as to what it is like to be young and broke in Los Angeles (apparently it is not like Entourage). That is why his first column is about New York. It will all make sense in time.
When you’re raised in and around the east coast, specifically the tri-state area (which in all fairness should be referred to as the bi-state area because Connecticut is just…), you tend to develop a very love-hate sort of relationship with your surroundings. Take, for example, the first city I ever knew, the city that I still refer to as “the city” even when I’m 3,000 miles away from it, the first place I had ever traveled to outside of New Jersey: New York.
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Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Blame childhood stereotypes and inept, though well-intentioned (love you, mommy!), mothers for broccoli’s bad rep amongst our generation. Steamed, boiled and, egad, microwaved, poor broccoli seems to be the lamb/cilantro of the vegetable world: people either love it or hate it. But here’s a recipe that will change the way you approach broccoli (not to mention every other colorful thing that grows out of the ground). By deeply caramelizing your broccoli, sans steaming or pre-cooking of any kind, the flavor profile changes from tepidly grassy to intensely earthy. The addition of the pasta rags, covered ever so slightly in the olive oil/broccoli business helps reinforce the idea that pasta should simply be dressed, not doused.
Full recipe after the jump.
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