Pasta

This is a mix-up of pasta e fagioli and minestra. Again, my indecisiveness is at play.

This dish can be made 100 ways. It’s one of the first dishes you eat as an Italian kid: macaroni with butter and ricotta cheese. Once you grow up, you add stuff in, but the base remains the same. I’ll try to limit myself and just give you my top five versions.

This meal and the next have appeared in other books of mine. I did not invent the dishes—they are classics. My take on these classics are my two favorite meals, ever. I simply could not have you (or me) live through a whole year without having these dishes in there somewhere. Enjoy these oldies-but-oh-so-goodies!

Puttanesca is a sauce named after streetwalkers. The ladies would make pots of a fishy-smelling mixture of tomatoes, anchovies, and garlic and leave the pots in brothel windows to attract fishermen in like stray cats. After the business was done, the sauce was tossed with pasta and became their dinner, or breakfast. This is a very unappetizing story for such a delicious dish, so when I am asked what “it” means, I tell a slightly less descriptive version, which you can pass along: Puttanesca is the sauce of the ladies of the night because it’s spicy, fast, and easy! (It still makes me blush, but at least I remain hungry.)

Related to my Chicken Mamacello story, this dish is all about singing for your supper. It is my at-home version of a chicken dish prepared at a fabulous opera café in New York City called Caffe Taci—the same café where Mama earned her nickname. The flavors in this dish are as big as Pavarotti’s voice and it will have you, too, singing for an encore plateful!