Sopa Seca

I first encountered this recipe in the Cook’s Illustrated cookbook The Quick Recipe. This has become one of our favorite dishes. Sopa Seca is essentially a Mexican casserole, based on pasta or sometimes rice. The pasta or the rice is browned before being combined with liquid and other ingredients and baked.

The recipe we like is made with pasta. Traditionally, the pasta used is fideo, a coiled vermicelli (sometimes fideo also refers to a dish similar to sopa seca.) I just use gluten free spaghetti. Tinkyada is the best brand that I have found.

The browning of the pasta was a surprising technique to me at first. (It also freaks out anyone who may be in the kitchen with you when you are cooking). It adds a rich nutty flavor that stands up nicely to the other strong flavors in the dish.

Browning the pasta

It works best to brown the pasta a handful at a time, so that you have more control. It can go from brown to burnt quickly. As each batch browns, transfer it to a baking dish.

All the browned pasta

Once all of the pasta is browned, you can use the same skillet to saute the onions and spices (cumin and chipotles). After a few minutes I add beans and veggies (in this case spinach and shredded zucchini, or sometimes broccoli chopped small) to make this a one dish meal. Then in goes the liquid that will cook the pasta, in my case veggie broth and the liquid from the tomatoes. Once it’s come up to bubbling, carefully pour the whole thing over the browned pasta.

Black beans, onions, garlic, chipotles, cumin, tomatoes, and shredded zuccini

You just have to have faith when you brown the pasta in the first step, and you just have to hang in there for the next part as well. When you pour the broth and veggies over the pasta, all of the veggies and the beans just kind of sit on top of the still hard noodles. It really doesn’t seem like it’s going to work at all.

The hot onion bean and tomato mixture goes over the noodles

After it’s been in the oven for 15 minutes or so, the liquid is absorbed by the noodles. When you give it a stir, you can see that the noodles are soft.

The pasta has cooked

Once the pasta has softened, you top the whole thing with some shredded cheddar or Monterey jack (pepper jack if you fell like having a really spicy dish), and return it to the oven for another five minutes. Creamy, spicy and delicious, I like this with some cilantro, avocado, a little sour cream and a big squeeze of lime juice. Make a big batch, it reheats nicely.

Baked Manicotti

One of our favorite recipes in my household is Baked Manicotti. Sheets of fresh pasta are rolled around a ricotta and mozzarella filling, nestled in a dish, slathered with a simple tomato sauce and baked until bubbly. Simple? Yes. However, I’ll borrow an expression from someone I know, this stuff is “so good that you could hurt yourself”.

After some discussion of the possibilities, we decided to make this for our Christmas dinner, knowing full well that there would be leftovers to enjoy the next day; Christmas all over again.

I had no experience with this dish until the January/February 2007 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. There I read a recipe for making baked manicotti that bypassed stuffing the traditional manicotti pasta tube. I was immediately intrigued by this recipe. The author describe a tedious, if not disastrous, process of stuffing pre-shaped pasta tubes, and the subsequent epiphany of rolling the filling inside pasta sheets. It sounded like something that would function like a lasagna, but might actually be a bit easier to pull together. The first time I tried it, we were hooked.

Now I did make one major variation from the recipe as published. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, my husband can’t eat wheat. Therefore the pasta recommended in the recipe was not an option. The recipe calls for using no-boil lasagna noodles, Ronzoni being CI’s favorite brand. The noodles are soaked briefly, drained and then filled and rolled to create the manicotti tubes. A little further investigation revealed that the no-boil noodles are thinner than the regular noodles. I thought, “oh well we can make our own pasta in sheets for this.”

Kneading the pasta dough

So you might be rolling your eyes and saying “oh yeah, that’s what you thought, I’m so sure.” Look, we had been making our own pasta for years prior to the discovery that we can’t use wheat flour in our kitchen. We were very happy to discover that we could just as easily make fresh pasta from flours other than wheat. Again, we owe a debt of gratitude to the late Bette Hagman for her recipe for bean flour pasta in her book The Gluten Free Gourmet. The bean flour recommended in the recipe is garfava flour, however straight garbanzo flour works well also (both are readily available at health food stores and some supermarkets.) This pasta has a wonderful flavor, and when cooked is as light as a feather. (If you have not ever tasted fresh pasta, wheat or gluten free, and by fresh I mean pasta that has not been dried for packaging, you really need to try it. It’s light and airy and just a whole different experience that the dried stuff.) I should think any traditional Italian fresh pasta recipe would work for this manicotti recipe, as would purchased ready made fresh pasta sheets

It’s not a work day recipe, as far as I’m concerned. Making pasta isn’t hard, but it is specific, and it does take some time, but not hours and hours. My husband Chris has turned out to be the pasta making master in the family, and it’s his hands in the pictures that you see making the pasta. Rolling the dough out for this recipe could be accomplished with a rolling pin, since no special shapes are required other than something at least vaguely rectangular. We do have a hand crank pasta machine, and it does make rolling out easier, faster and more consistent. (Ours is the Al Dente brand, which is not necessarily the highest rated, but it has served us well for about 5 years). There are electric ones out there, as well as attachments for the Kitchenaid standing mixer, but I don’t know anything about them.

Rolling out the pasta I

Rolling out the pasta II

Ready to be manicotti

Alright, so enough already about the pasta. The sauce is a super basic tomato sauce flavored with garlic, red pepper flakes and olive oil. Normally fresh basil and parsley are included, but it is December in New England, and the fresh parsley and basil that was in the market when I was shopping was dismally substandard, so I decided to skip them both. (I certainly could have tried going round to some other stores, but I just wanted to go home.) I do have dried basil from the plants that were in my garden this past summer, so it still has a good amount of flavor. The ricotta filling is similar to what you would find in a lasagna recipe, mixed with eggs, salt and pepper, Parmesan cheese, basil (and normally fresh parsley, but as I mentioned, it was a no go).

Like any simple recipe the quality of ingredients is imperative. Good ricotta is a wonderful thing. Bad ricotta is like chalky cottage cheese–your basic nightmare. Please remember, it is a major player in this particular recipe. Ricotta is traditionally made from the whey leftover from making Romano. There are recipes out there for making your own ricotta. If you’ve gotten in to making your own fresh cheeses, such as paneer, this is something to consider. If like most of us you’re buying your ricotta, don’t cheap out. If you can get hold of some local artesian stuff at your farmer’s market, or if your local Italian market makes their own, by all means go with that. Please please please if you are shopping for ricotta in the supermarket, buy Calabro. (Whole Foods may be the only national chain in the US that carries it; I’ll look into it more.) Pester your supermarket people to carry it if they don’t. I’m not just plugging these guys because I’m originally from CT, where they are based. I’m not going to name names, but all of the other major national brands have gums and stabilizers,which, despite lengthening their shelf life, just make them taste terrible. Period. I’m not even of Italian ethnic heritage and I understand this.

I have similar opinions about Parmesan cheese, but I am going to refrain from carrying on about them here.

Making the pasta is the most involved part. You can have the sauce bubbling while you mix up the filling. Then, once your pasta sheets are rolled out and cut to size, you’re ready to go.

Ready to be rolled

Nestled in, ready for the sauce and the oven

I’m pushing it a bit by crowding them in, but I did not want to start another pan.

Sauced

After 40 minutes or so in the oven, you have an incredible pasta experience. All you need to round out the meal is a simple salad.

It fell apart a bit while serving, but no one cared.

The photos are here.

Pasta with Creamy Tomato Sauce

I was looking for a break from the Tempeh Chili and a way to use up the rest of the cream from Thanksgiving before it spoiled. I had been meaning to try the Creamy Tomato Recipe from the May/June 2008 issue of Cook’s Illustrated (subscription necessary) and never got around to it. This was the perfect opportunity.

You might be thinking that this is just marinara with cream stirred in. It’s more deliberate than that. The base is typical, sauted finely diced onion, bay leaf, red pepper flakes and garlic. It calls for butter rather than olive oil as the fat, which is a sensible pairing with the cream, but I think olive oil would work, too. The recipe also calls for a little prosciutto in the mix, but I of course left that out. Tomato paste is added at the end of the saute and allowed to darken. This and chopped sundried tomato help to add tomato dimensions beyond what the canned tomato would have offered. Dry white wine for acidity to balance the sweetness of the tomatoes seems essential. I was considering using lemon juice instead, but the brightness of it would probably be lost in the time needed to cook the sauce until thick. The cream is stirred in at the very end, with a dash more wine, cooking water from your pasta as needed and of course salt and pepper. It came together quickly, in under an hour. The step of simmering the sauce until thick provides enough time to boil pasta and pull together a salad.

Pasta w/ Creamy Tomato Sauce

For the salad I just went with straight romaine dressed with Roasted Garlic Vinaigrette from The Grit Cookbook (which is another stupendous veggie cookbook title you should totally get). I like garlic in my vinaigrette anyway, but the roasted version is a wonderful mellow change of pace. When you make it in a blender or food processor it emulsifies into a beautiful creamy dressing that still has the acidity of your typical vinaigrette. I like the contrast of a rich dish like this pasta sauce with the sharpness of the vinegar.

By the way, The Grit is like the Moosewood of Athens, GA. I’ve never been there, but If I’m ever within even a day’s drive I will totally go out of my way to dine there. I mean just look at that menu. A lot of those goodies are in the cookbook.