Kaimusailing

The superfoiler race series from Geelong, Australia happened on their Sunday afternoon, our Saturday evening on the USA East Coast. I managed to fall asleep while napping so I could follow the action from about 10 PM to midnight Saturday. I woke Sunday morning.
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I was able to watch the replay on You Tube and enjoyed the racing. I think the video clip is more than 2 hours long, but you can hit the right arrow key and jump ahead a few seconds at a time and skip over some of the interviews, etc., that are inserted between the races to fill time. The races were concluding about as fast as a Ted Talk, around 20 minutes. This is a new boat design and the crews are learning how to sail the frisky beasts. This is the second venue in the race series and the sailing was better than last week. I think this will be a weekly series for a total of five weekends.
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In response to a question about fettuccine I was reminded of a dish called paglia e fieno, Italian for “straw and hay”, a dish with spinach fettuccine and egg fettuccine in an alfredo sauce and spiced with garlic and parsley, and including mushrooms and pancetta, or sausage, or diced ham, peas, and sometimes made with a ricotta and parmesan cheese to make the sauce. As I talked about it, I began to wish I had some. I was going shopping, why not get the ingredients and whip up a batch.
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I have been using Walmart’s Great Value Garden Rotini as my pasta, when I can get it, because it has lots of nutrients in it, looks great, colorful, and the rotini has lots of ridges to trap sauce, tasty. Paglia e fieno is made from thin fettuccine noodles that ball up with the alfredo sauce. The pasta and the egg noodles are very different, but I made other compromises. I found a jar of Prego roasted garlic alfredo sauce and thus did not have to make the sauce from scratch, but it would have been better, just as using fettuccine would have been better.
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A package of mild Italian sausage and a package of frozen peas were added to the shopping cart. I actually did try to buy the ingredients to make the sauce from scratch but some how missed the heavy cream on the shopping list. A box of sliced mushrooms.
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There are many videos and online recipes of this dish and variations. One of the best is Susan Bradley’s Luna Cafe website which has a lot of other delicious recipes. She writes well and reminds me of Martha Stewart, in a nice way, because she takes tremendous effort to refine her dishes.
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Because I exclusively cook on a stove top, never using an oven, a lot of restaurant style recipes are off limits to me. Many of Martha Stewart’s culinary works of art are born in the oven, so I can maybe adapt some of the recipes, but mostly they are out.
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Most of the videos show the pasta going into a pot of boiling water and the ingredients for the sauce going into a large skillet. These are stove top appliances applicable to my galley. I have two two burner cook tops, one is alcohol and costs a lot of money, the other is propane and costs very little money, from Harbor Freight. This time I cooked in the communal kitchen on a single burner electric cook top.
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First I cooked the pasta, drained it and set it aside. I used a 12 oz box of garden rotini.
Then I began the sauce. Most of the chefs are doing the mushrooms and peas first in some order, then doing pancetta or sausage separately. I prefer to cook the meat first, then use the pan and the browned bits to flavor the other ingredients. The mushrooms are cooked a bit to release their liquid and the peas are lightly sauteed.
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Traditionally heavy cream and parmigiano reggiano cheese is blended together in a skillet and melted and thickened to make the base for the sauce. Ricotta can be used together with parmigiano and sometimes a roux is started of milk, butter, and flour. If you forget the cream at the market, you may have grabbed a jar of alfredo sauce off the shelf. It’s not as good as fresh made from scratch sauce, but it is certainly very easy to dump the jar into the skillet.
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When the peas and mushrooms are cooked a bit, the prosciutto or sausage or pancetta is added, then the sauce, mixture is allowed to mingle and coalesce. Next it is mixed with the pasta and served up. Some recipes add eggs or egg yolks to the cream, some spice with nutmeg or rosemary. It is similar to a carbonara sauce.
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We tucked into the product and found that it was rich and filling. Think about cooking on a sailboat out there in the blue. You can try to balance things in the galley, but the more prepackaged items you use, the easier it is to cook, preventing unnecessary nautical language. Unfortunately most of the ingredients require refrigeration, but pasta sauce jars do not. Peas are a dilemma, you can use frozen or fresh, neither is preferred by the blue water galley cook. Freeze dried peas probably wouldn’t work out too well, as well as having this dish in freeze dried form. A carbonara would do better out at sea.
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I steal photos from the internet all the time and I also offer a lot of photography on Flickr and don’t expect any compensation or attribution. The photos aren’t much good if I take them and view them and don’t get them out to anyone else. There has been some grief raised on the dpreview.com website about professional photographers being undermined by internet sites and users who steal images and use them and don’t do anything productive for the creator of the images.
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I did not take photos while I was cooking in the communal kitchen. A fellow was doing his laundry at the other end of the room which is as small as a walk in closet. I should to a time lapse next time.
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So, I am reduced to stealing another photo from the internet, of course from Susan Bradley’s excellent blog. It is the image she uses to illustrate Paglia e Fieno, but look how good it is, a sprig of rosemary at the back edge of the dish, slices of wild mushrooms, plus she includes the recipe she used. Thelunacafe.com.