Pasta & Noodles

You can use this recipe to make spinach gnocchi: Thaw 1 10-ounce package frozen spinach, very finely chop the leaves, and squeeze out the moisture. Add it to the potatoes in the bowl, and sprinkle with an additional 2 tablespoons flour. Formed gnocchi can be refrigerated on a floured baking sheet, uncovered, up to 12 hours.

To julienne the vegetables, cut them into thin matchstick-size pieces using a sharp knife or a mandoline. Refrigerate them in an airtight container until ready to use, up to 3 hours.

The broth left over from poaching chicken breasts makes a delicious soup base. Refrigerate it in an airtight container up to 3 days or freeze up to 2 weeks; bring to a boil before using.

This recipe will serve four as a first course or light lunch. To serve the noodles as a meal, add a few cups of diced firm tofu or cooked chicken breast to the simmering broth in step 3.

Look for soba noodles in the Asian section of your supermarket.

The stock must be refrigerated at least 6 hours; make it 1 day ahead.

Richly colored with paprika, this traditional Hungarian entrée is full bodied and satisfying. It goes well with Balsamic-Marinated Vegetables (page 78).

No matter how much you like to cook, everyone gets stuck in a rut. When you find yourself making the same old things, it’s time to cook out of your comfort zone. For us, this means a trip to any international market where one step inside we remember how much there still is to learn. The good news is that walking the aisles of the unfamiliar unlocks the secrets to many of the ingredients in our favorite restaurant dishes. The greens in the produce section alone will keep us busy for a year. We can’t shop when we’re hungry, so first we eat. Thankfully, the Vietnamese noodle bowls right next door energize and inspire our international shopping trips. Vietnamese noodle bowls are filled with contradictions in complete agreement—hot and cold, crunchy and soft, sweet and sour, rich and light. The bowls of warm thin noodles, cool leafy lettuce, bean sprouts, and herbs topped with any meat or seafood you like are perfect for leftover cheater meat. The sweet/salty/spicy dressing may appear way too complex for home cooking. It’s not. The international market has everything you need. Cooking out of your comfort zone will help you dissect the components and flavors of unfamiliar foods. Even if cooking Vietnamese at home sounds daunting, give this a try with leftover cheater meat just for the fun of better understanding how opposites get along.

This is the poorest of dishes for the days when the seas are as empty as one’s belly, when even the clams have forsaken one. Fashioned from seawater—sometimes bits of seaweed—a tomato or two, some fat, firm garlic, a dried red chile, and a thread of good oil or a spoonful of sweet, rendered pork fat, hoarded from an easier day.

Twenty kilometers from our home sits the bustling Latian village of Acquapendente. There we find our trustworthy pork butcher, our panificio di famiglia (family bakery), and the only shop between Rome and Florence where Erich can find the music of Astor Piazzola. Hence, Acquapendente is a sort of vortex for us. It is on early Friday mornings when it beckons us most plaintively, the day the market—the mercato—comes to town. It is a good-enough market at any time of the year, but steeled in late January fogs is how we like it best. From our home in San Casciano dei Bagni, higher up by four hundred feet and, in winter, sitting nearly always in crystal air, we descend the narrow, sloping road past the sheepfolds, past the ostrich farm, away from the new, gold sun, fresh from its rise, and into the thick, purply mists of the rough little place. Wrapped in our woolens we stroll the abundant tables of green-black Savoy cabbages and violet broccoli, baskets of potatoes and turnips unwashed of their Latian earth. Here and there are lit small, consoling charcoal fires in funny little tripod burners over which the farmers thaw their ungloved hands. Just outside the fray are the humbler posts, those that beg no rent, that are had for their predawn staking. The farmers, sober in the unpacified cold, unwrap their often meager stuffs—a basket of chestnuts, one of cauliflower, and once, a man, standing beside his little pile of pumpkins, held a brace of pheasant, still dripping their blood on the frozen ground, his booty from a predawn hunt—offering them at far lower prices than those asked by their more prosperous colleagues inside the village. It was there, too, at the Friday mercato in Acquapendente that a woman from Bolsena, who was selling just-ground chestnut flour, sat on the edge of her table and wrote out this most wonderful recipe. The smokiness of the chestnut flour enlarges upon the forest scents of the mushrooms, the whole combining into a sensual sort of rusticity. If chestnut flour is not to be found at your specialty store, substitute whole wheat or buckwheat flour and mix 3 ounces of canned, unsweetened chestnut puree with the mascarpone.

Gnocchi is one of those dishes that many home cooks shy away from. Whether they’re made of potatoes or cheese, the process seems mysterious—until, of course, you finally take the plunge and make a batch yourself at home. These ricotta gnocchi are quick and easy and the perfect launch into your gnocchi-making career. Once you get the hang of rolling them off the tines of the fork, there’s nothing to it. And when you’ve become the accomplished gnocchi-maker you never thought you’d be, you’ll find all sorts of ways to serve them. Try them with a fresh tomato sauce, or simply toss them in this sage brown butter.

This colorful mélange of flavors and textures is easy enough for a weeknight meal, yet gorgeous enough to impress guests.