What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [27]
“When I’ve eaten a tin of smoked oysters,” he says, “I save the oil in the can. The next day I cook up linguini using the al dente taste test, then drain it. I leave the can on top of the hot pasta for a minute to extract the entire yummy oyster flavor, then pour it over the noodles.”
Taking a tip from him, one night I found myself pouring the olive oil from a can of Spanish sardines over a salad of potatoes (left over from Patrick’s seven-at-once fuel-saving effort), celery, hard-cooked egg, and green olives. A good dish. And the sardines went on toast for an appetizer. Another solo cook, who didn’t save his oil, downed his canned oysters, oil and all, with Tabasco sauce and beer. But this was an appetizer. Pasta came later, or so he claimed.
Dried pasta has already been made for you. That’s the big time-saver. But water has to come to a boil, the pasta has to cook, and during this interval you might as well do something—open that can of tuna, chop herbs, dice tomatoes, separate a head of cauliflower into little florets. Pasta offers a good compromise between cooking everything from scratch and not cooking anything at all. But despite the ease with which this can happen (and pasta’s short but popular history in America as a standby dish), it wasn’t mentioned nearly as often as we thought it might be. Perhaps it’s the carbs.
Spaghetti with tuna, however, is a dish that draws upon these two basic cupboard foods—canned fish and noodles. “I keep a small can of Mediterranean tuna on hand,” writes the author of this recipe. “You bring water to a boil, add salt, and drop in boxed pasta—spaghetti or linguini. While it cooks, put tuna in a skillet and break it up. Add chopped fresh garlic and hot pepper flakes. A minute before the pasta is cooked, put chopped arugula in the skillet to wilt. Drain the pasta and add it to the skillet with plenty of freshly squeezed lemon juice. Have it with cold white wine or rosé. A good summer dish.”
When it did come up, though, the approaches to a box of spaghetti were generally wholesome and good. That is, vegetables were included and often in quantity. One clear winner is green penne with potatoes and broccoli recommended by a bachelor who cooks, whom we met on one of our food trips.
“In more or less equal portions, you’re going to cook penne rigate (the quills with grooves running the length of each noodle), broccoli, and potatoes. You’re going to cut the vegetables into bite-size pieces and throw everything simultaneously into boiling salted water. You’re going to break up anchovies (another tinned fish), and heat them in a skillet with olive oil, freshly chopped garlic, and pepper flakes. Then you’re going to toss it all together. You get a green coating on everything. Add grated Parmesan and you have a great dinner.”
This is an excellent dish. And so is hungry man’s pasta proposed by another traveling acquaintance. “What I do when I’m really hungry is I cook Rusticella pasta. It’s pasta Abruzzi style. I put jarred arugula sauce—it’s got arugula, almonds, and anchovies in it—and add olive oil.” If you can find some of this sauce, you will be well advised to do the same. If not, you can make the sauce with ease.
Joe Simone, another fellow traveler through Puglia in south-eastern Italy, who is also a chef, described pasta as a trustworthy standby food. His approach is to toss pasta with cauliflower, toasted breadcrumbs, chile pepper, and plenty of “good olive oil.” Admittedly, we were in Puglia with a lot of others on a quest for good olive oil, but Joe would always want to use good olive oil no matter where he’d be cooking. Indeed, it makes everything taste better. He adds, “This is a great dish for anyone, and it doesn’t have to be eaten alone. In fact it’s better shared, but then, a lot of things are.”
Our affable neighbor, Ken Khune, regularly devotes an hour or two to cooking dinner