Pasta Campionissimo

This is a quick and cheap pasta dish I make pretty often, because it tastes so damn good.

It is based on the "homestyle" pasta I've had at Centro Formaggi and uses cheap ingredients that are easy to always have on hand.

It's a simple dish to make, but is very complex because all the flavours are restrained. The key to this dish is that nothing should be overpowering.

The sauce should be thin, almost watery, and there shouldn't be too much "stuff" in it. If you're unsure about how much meat or garlic or basil to use, just use less of it.

Though the ingredients are relatively expensive, but you don't use much of them, and they keep well (except the basil).

For the noodle I prefer a ridged tubular noodle like tortiglioni rather than long noodles like linguine.


Ingredients:
pasta
strained tomato puree
garlic
olive oil
1 anchovy fillet
proscuitto chunks
salami pieces (optional)
basil
proscuitto chunks

Step 1: I boil the pasta and that is enough time to whip up the sauce:

I lightly warm some chopped garlic in olive oil with some diced proscuitto chunks. Use medium heat, we don't want to sautee this. I buy the proscuitto "ends" cheap at the grocery and they will keep in the fridge for a long time. Here I also added some sliced up salami.



Step 2: I also always try to have on hand anchovy fillets in oil and strained tomatoes (pic below).

I take a anchovy fillet and squash it into a paste with the blade of a knife and add it to the mixture. I might also add some of the oil from the anchovy jar. The anchovies are very salty and aromatic, it is meant to serve only as a flavouring, you don't want to overdo them.

I prefer these strained tomatoes in the jar so I can pour out what I want and easily fridge the rest. Also it has a much lighter taste than the stuff packaged as "sauce".



Step 3: Finally I pour in the desired amount of sauce and some fresh basil leaves (uncut) and let it warm up (without boiling). The basil will just wilt in the heat.



Now just add the finished sauce to the cooked and drained pasta. Here I've served it up with some Pecorino Romano crumbled on top, just a little bit.



This dish spoils me, since it's unlikely that any pasta dish I can order up at a restaurant will taste as good to me or seem like a good value.

Papamios Veal Sangwich

I've hit up a Papamios veal sangwich (Dupont + Manning) a few times.





It's a lot better tasting than it looks.

The veal is sitting in some sauce, so it's really soft and mushy in the sangwich - the effect is like a veal sloppy joe, and it's messier to eat than a San Fran sangwich. It's nicely seasoned though and you can get it topped with some marinated hott peppers which have some bite. ($5.75, also $8.50 with penne pasta).

News: Veal Price Increase

I went to San Francescos today for a veal sandwich. They've got a sign next to the cash register saying that there will be a price increase on Sept 10.

More Veal

Yesterday I didn't go downtown because of the TTC strike, so I decided to try the Chesswood outlet of California sandwiches. It's located on Sheppard just north of Downsview park, basically in the middle of nowhere. If you look up the location on their website you get a sense of what the place looks like...total suburban blah. Anyway, inside there's a lady taking orders, a lady frying up the veal, and a lady wrapping up the sandwiches, all in the area that you can see. In the back, there are more ladies dusting and breading up the veal. The veal frying is such a process. There are 3 different pans of oil and the veal frying lady is moving the meat from pan to pan. I never really figured out what was going on in the end.

So anyway, I ended up getting a sweet veal sandwich ($5.65+tax) with an eggplant topping ($2.xx+tax) which ended up being a $9 sandwich. The eggplant is a breaded and deep-fried slab of eggplant, not the marinated stuff you get at San Francesco or whatever. The result is a pretty huge sandwich - no feeling hungry after this one. This is a good thing, because a $9 sandwich is pretty much blingin' it.

However, having eaten the Calif veal twice now, I'm going to have to reverse my previous stance and conclude that the veal is inferior to what you get at San Francesco. Somehow it's crispier (good) but less flavourful (bad). The veal at SF has some nice meaty taste to it whereas the veal at Calif is more like an institutional veal cutlet at the mental hospital's cafeteria - bland. Maybe having the hot peppers last time covered this fact for me; the texture of the Calif veal is a bit nicer, but it doesn't make up for the lack of flavour.

Of course, it was a veal sangwich so I can't complain - still a good lunch.