Saturday, October 13, 2001


just now finished putting the bowling alley wax on my kitchen floor. whew! no fun! so i'm rewarding myself with a few squares of el rey mijao chocolate. . .i still slightly prefer the bucare, but the mijao is a delicious variety as well.

yesterday i got too ambitious, and decided to try to reproduce a dish i had at lupa, a special of hand-made whole-wheat orechiette with glazed chanterelles. i find all the food at lupa a tad too salty, and this was no exception, but it was still a marvel. on the way out i caught one of the staff, who said a very similar recipe could be found in a cookbook by deborah madison. she's long been one of my favorite chefs, and i own just about all her books, so i had the recipe.

thus i fought my way downtown in the afternoon to buy chanterelles. there's a famous store on the lower-east side that specialized in mushrooms, but i thought it might be easier just to get to dean & deluca, even though i loathe the place. the prices for the fresh chanterelles and baby porcini were truly shocking, and they didn't have much of a selection of orechiette. thus i ended up buying some of their fresh pappardelle, which was truly a mistake. it was just shockingly terrible -- too thin, too little egg -- and ruined the whole dish. thus i re-learned my lesson: you can't take short cuts with ingredients! i should have stuck with the artisanal dried pasta.

this furthered my resolve to begin making my own pasta, which as a flour product, might fall slightly into our bread category! i'm signing up for pizza and pasta-making classes pronto, my friends! naturally i just missed the pasta class. . . .

but there is a little recipe for the little ear-shaped pasta here.

posted by fortune | 1:12 PM | top | link to this | email this: | | | 0 comments