Penne with Vodka Sauce

A while ago, I dated a guy who I’ll call Jamie. He was lanky with messy blond hair and eyes that were piercing pools of blue. There’s no way you could miss his bright eyes in a crowd, if you gazed at him long enough, you could feel him reading every thought running through your mind.

On our first date, we went to see Rock of Ages. I love Broadway shows, they always put me in a good mood, but this time, I was more anxious than excited. I had those first date jitters, uncertain how to behave in front of a stranger. It didn’t help that my date kept glancing over at me, I didn’t know whether to return his looks or pay attention to the show.

At intermission, Jamie grabbed my hand and led me through a winding flight of stairs to the top floor overlooking the stage. This was the first of many explorations, he had a thing for spontaneous mini adventures, a quality I didn’t realize I would like so much. The theatre was musty, ancient, and beautiful. Blood-red walls and tall mirrors filled the halls, gold painted moldings snaked behind us, Jamie turned to face me and flashed a megawatt smile, the stair railing was the only thing keeping me from swooning to the floor.

When the show ended, we followed the hoard of people dispersing into the spring night and made our way to the subway. As chivalrous as could be, he sat beside me on the hour long commute to make sure I got home safely even though he lived just a few minutes from the theatre. As I leaned against the wall waiting for the subway at Bloor, he locked eyes with me, grinned and without missing a beat, leaned in for a kiss. Our lips met and a shot of electricity ran down my spine, leaving me clamoring for more.

On our date number two, we met up at Kensington Market on a sunny Saturday morning to pick up ingredients for lunch. We filled a grocery tote with red and orange peppers and a pound of shiny tomatoes. Jamie then brought me to a fromagerie. As he scoured for a Danish cheese for me to sample, I ogled the cheese rounds stacked so high I could barely see the lady working behind the counter not to mention the charcuterie that hung like Christmas lights around the store. Sadly, he couldn’t find the cheese he wanted, so we stepped out with another cheese instead.

Just as we were about to leave, I declared basil my favourite herb and how sublime it would taste in the pasta dish we were going to make, he spun around, disappeared into another store and seconds later, came out with a bouquet of the leafy herb so intoxicating I nearly fainted. With a spring in his step, he lugged the brimming grocery bag in one hand and took my free hand with the other.

When we arrived at his apartment, we unloaded our ingredients and got to work. Jamie took out the recipe and assigned me on pasta duty. As I familiarized myself around the cramped kitchen, a fluttery feeling flooded inside me. His strong, muscular arms that moved across the chopping board, the clap clap clap of the knife against the board, spilling vermillion tomato juices everywhere, that mischievous smile as if he had something up his sleeve killed me.

I moved on to prepare a salad of mixed greens, cucumbers and cherry tomatoes. Jamie manned the stove and teased out the most luscious, the sexiest tomato sauce ever to cross your mouth. There was a generous glug of cream to thicken the tomatoes plus a healthy splash of vodka. Anything with booze is a winner in my book, as is a guy who can cook. Heaping portions were ladled onto plates along with the salad. We sat across from each other on the dark wooden table and dug in. After a few bites, Jamie reached over for my hand, and there it was again, his enormous smile. Smooth conversation flowed and he continued to caress my hand for the rest of lunch, my heart swelling like a hot air balloon.

We continued dating for a few more months before reality hit me squarely in the face and I realized it wasn’t going to work. I was crushed. Whenever I walked by his neighborhood, my blood would freeze and all I could picture was my broken heart. But overtime it’s gotten easier.

For months I've hesitated writing this piece for many reasons, however, I’ve been on a crazy pasta binge lately and felt compelled to share this recipe. It’s SO yum. This sauce can be made on a whim, with just a few ingredients that hopefully you already have sitting in your fridge. Each ridge of penne soaks up the sweet, creamy sauce and like all great loves, this sauce will make you swoon.

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Pasta with Squash and Brown Butter

When I was forced to cook for myself back in my undergrad years, and soup noodles with boiled bok choy and canned sardines was getting tedious, I would escape from dorm and stay with my cousin Sandra in downtown Montreal for the weekend.

We would pore over food magazines, Epicurious, cookbooks or just bounced dinner ideas back and forth based on our cravings. One food magazine we flipped through for inspiration even in the frigid December was a summer issue of Donna Hay. She’s my first food idol, her pictures are always alluring, simple and clean, her menu ideas entertaining and fresh.

A while ago, Sandra had dated a tall, handsome fellow with the finest manners, even the Queen couldn’t stifle a crush on him. He had a sexy, deep chuckle to compliment Sandra’s shrill laughter and he always made her smile in a way that even her eyes twinkled. For her birthday, he bought her Donna Hay’s Instant Cook and on the inside front cover scribbled in thick black Sharpie was a love note that went something like this:

Happy birthday, may you cook many more drool-worthy meals…so you can share it all with your friends, especially me. 

I treated that cookbook like my own, I studied each page like a textbook, furiously bookmarking recipes that caught my attention. Sometimes I used my old Canon point and shoot to photograph a recipe like the eggplant ricotta and parmesan bake.

However, my impatience to have my own cookbook grew too strong. One quiet morning, I succumbed to my unrelenting desire need for the beautiful books, so rather than memorizing the chemical structure of branched-chain amino acids and how many ATP are produced from 1 glucose molecule (Biochem anyone?), I jumped on Indigo.com and purchased not one-but two Donna Hay books. I convinced myself: they are an early Christmas gift…the shipping is free…I’ve been mostly frugal this month! 

Soon enough, a slender cardboard package arrived at my front door. I tore threw it like a kid on Boxing Day and jumped up and down. They might not have endearing notes scrawled on the inside, but they belonged to me, and it wasn’t long before I bought more of her books including Entertaining and Modern Classics Volume 1.

One of the things I love about Donna Hay is the inspiring, easily adaptable recipes. I first made this pasta on Thanksgiving weekend back in October (we Canadians celebrate the holiday a month before our neighbors). If you were here on the East coast, you may recall how oddly warm that weekend was, so warm in fact, I sat outside on the balcony in my pajama shorts and a t-shirt (short sleeves! in the fall!) and slurped my pasta with the sun beaming on my face. And of course, the best part of this dish is the brown butter. Did I get your attention? Repeat after me folks, brown butter. Brown butter. Brown butter. I don’t think I need to explain, it really is the best thing ever.

 

The brown butter is laced into every noodle, the squash accentuating its caramelized flavour and the parmesan tones down the sweetness with its salty pungency. This sauce is so phenomenal, so brilliant, it will knock your socks off. Don’t wear socks? Pants! It will knock your pants off!

The procedure is a breeze: golden fat is slowly melted to a beautiful deep color, turning your kitchen into a nutty, sweet heaven. Then this liquid gold is tossed with pasta and cubed squash plus a generous handful of sharp parmesan. Tada! That's it.

Just remember, brown butter makes everything taste ridiculously good. If it was drenched over cardboard, I bet you would like it too (but not advised).

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Spaghetti Bolognaise

My relationship with food wasn’t always a happy one. Because my parents have raised me to always eat everything that’s been served to me, I’ve had my fair share of bad experiences.


Years ago, my dad made a simple Cantonese lunch of steamed rice in clay pot with some leftover chicken and slices of lap cheong (dried sausage). I stared at the piece of meat mottled with white fat. It was merely the size of a nickel, but it looked like a ghastly monster clasped between my chopsticks. I shut my eyes and swallowed, willing myself not to chew for fear of prolonging the intolerable salty taste disintegrating in my mouth. I remember running to the bathroom, throwing myself over the sink, desperate to get rid of the horrid sausage bolus before it burned my esophagus.

On another occasion, my parents forced me to eat guilingao or turtle jelly (derived from powdered turtle shell plus a few other Chinese herbs). Despite my parents touting its complexion-enhancing properties, it did not deter me from cringing at the turtles hanging out in the corner of the restaurant, with their freakishly long necks and beady eyes staring back at me. Yuck! I’d rather have 1000 pimples than eat turtle. As my parents slurped away their bowls of this so-called "dessert", my reflection in the black jelly stared back at me, the thought of eating even a smidgen of bitter jello made me burst into tears. I don’t recall what happened afterwards, probably because I wiped it out of my memory.

On happier days, my parents would take me out for pasta, where there was no need to coax me into eating dinner, especially spaghetti bolognaise. I’d stab my heaping pile of pasta with my fork, twirling it around and around, literally stuffing my face with meat sauce, staining my shirt, my mouth and sometimes my nose. It was a nightmare for my mom, but a heaven for me.


Nowadays, there is no food-stabbing, less shirt-staining and more pleasurable meals. Whenever my mom makes pasta, I cook the sauce. I’ve picked up a handy trick from Jamie Oliver in his Jamie's Italy cookbook, it turns out that adding balsamic vinegar to tomato sauce transforms it into a complex, grown-up dish. It’s not cloyingly sweet nor overly acidic, the spaghetti soaks up the deep tomato flavour, having you begging for more.

My mom for instance, likes loves LURRVES spaghetti. She can polish off a big plate of noodles in half the time it takes my dad and me. I don’t know where she got her noodle slurping skills, but I definitely didn’t inherit her genes.


The recipe is easy to follow, do all the prep work before hand and you dinner will be ready in no time. I promise there will be no tears and no power struggles at the dinner table. On a side note, I’m happy to report that I will eat lap cheong without running to the bathroom, though I still have issues with turtle jelly (shivers).

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Bravi

It's taken longer than expected to discover restaurants that lure me to return again and again. Lynn Crawford's Ruby Watchco on Queen Street East has definitely earned Must Go Back status. I not only watch her admiringly on the Food Network, but her creativity in combining ordinary ingredients to create extraordinary tastes is really just...well, extraordinary. Another terrific place is Auberge du Pommier at York Mills. The food is clean and crisp and fresh bread baked on the premises always earns brownie points in my book. My favorite part was sitting outdoors under the canary yellow and white stripped canopy surrounded by the lush garden.


This weekend I went with Minh to Bravi on Wellington Street East. An Italian restaurant that is definitely underrated. From the moment we walked in (Oopsies! 30 minutes late) we felt welcomed. The host took our coats and immediately offered us drinks at the bar. I sipped a glass of juicy sweet Kim Crawford rosé and Minh enjoyed a caesar.

A few moments later we were brought to our table, I didn't think much of it, it looked like an ordinary seating for two nestled in the corner. Our noon brunch was big enough to tide us over the whole day, giving us plenty of energy to walk from the Harbourfront to the Distillery district. We window shopped luxurious furniture shops, touched everything in quirky craft stores and explored cafes, inhaling lusty fumes of chocolate. By 8:30pm, I was ready to eat and boy, was I in for a surprise.



My arugula salad with bosc pear, roasted pistachios, and pecorino was divine. The perfect balance of bitter and sweet was pronounced with the Meyer lemon and olive oil dressing. The cheese added a hint of nuttiness to the dish. Minh's turnip puree with apples was sumptuous too. One bite took me on a wave of flavors (in a good way), first was that earthiness from root vegetables, followed by a jolt of tartness from the fruit yet tamed by the lemon cream.

The highlight of the night was not the food however; it was how our entrees took us on a high (literally). “Would you like to go for a ride?” Our waiter politely asked. Dumbstruck, I stuttered, “S-s-sure.” What I naively thought was “just” a quiet corner was really a freight elevator. As it clanged and clacked upwards, my jaw dropped. The company of other restaurant patrons disappeared and were replaced with the carved initials of lovers who declared their feelings in every wooden crevice possible. The only noise was distant voices from the kitchen and our forks scraping food off the plate. How sneaky Minh was to book this place, voted one of the most romantic dinner spots in Toronto.


I've been craving pasta the past few weeks so naturally, I ordered the basil-infused pasta sheets with seafood in a tomato sauce. It was lovely. Delicious. Fresh pieces of shrimp, scallops and squid were tender and succulent among the slippery rags of pasta. The robust sauce was rich and chunky in tomato. Minh's salmon with roast fennel was fabulous, the fillet intensely moist, the vegetables slippery on my tongue; fragrances of licorice and olive oil swirled together harmoniously.


I'm sure the elevator has passed rigorous testing and that it is in tiptop condition, but despite Minh's urging, I was too much of a scaredy cat to take a ride up and down. Why risk getting stuck in an old elevator with only a candle as a source of light? We had already finished our meal, the bread basket was long gone, and if it stopped working, what could we possibly survive on? Green olives? (Yuck) So we finished our main courses, came back down to ground level and stayed put with our desserts.

Though it’s always nice to lounge on my sofa and eat homemade bread, I still reminiscence the crackly olive bread, the soft and chewy rings of squid, and the thick cut pasta sheets in the quiet confines of the elevator.

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Lobster pasta with cheese sauce

My parents came home with a 7lb lobster. It sat quietly in the sink with its beady black eyes and its large claws tied shut. I named it Robert. Don't you think robert is a suitable lobster name?


Its been more than a year since my parents and I have made a meal together. Since Mama C has moved here, she's been the executive chef. I've been demoted to dishwasher--not that I mind. I’m thankful for coming home from work and have dinner ready for me plus lunch for the next day.

My dad is visiting for a month, and his tastes are like mine. We desire for strong, adventurous flavors. Whereas mom prefers mild and less aggressive foods, example: my dad and I once dined over Sichuan food while my mom ate lunch an hour earlier and watched as we gulped down chunks of spicy hot chicken and chili oil noodles.

As much as I enjoy my mom's cooking, I’m especially happy for my dad's presence in the kitchen. He is not afraid to try new ingredient combinations, like how he makes fried rice with canned tuna, or concocting a miso marinade for a beef dish. I like to think I've inherited his cooking style.

So back to Robert. We decided to make a lobster pasta with cheese. There's a popular Hong Kongnese dish that bakes lobster with cheese on top, almost like a lazy and shapless gratin. My mom loves lobster. I skimmed through Epicurious (my trusty resource for all things culinary) for cheese sauces. The most effortless recipe instructed for milk, cheese, butter and egg yolks to be stirred in a double boiler. Clever! Sly! This way you would avoid burning the cheese and allows for a smooth consistency.


I didn't bother following a recipe; I like to use Epicurious for inspiration when it comes to cooking impromptu. I attacked the sauce based on my gut feeling. I poured the ingredients into a bowl set over a pot of simmering water and whisked. I added some parmesan for good measure, and what was once a lumpy mass became a velvety sauce.

Meanwhile, my dad was attacking Robert like a viking. Draining its wastes, plunging Robert into hot water, allowing his murky green shell to turn fire engine red. Then my dad pondered how to break him apart into smaller pieces. We didn't have a hammer, a nutcracker, nor a chopping knife. I suggested laying Red Robert on a cutting board and cracking him with the edge of another cutting board. Alas! It worked. My dad divided him into dozens of pieces, tossed him into a pan with sizzling garlic. He added rice wine and let the stock simmer. Five minutes later, it was ready. I tossed cooked linguine into the pot, added the cheese sauce, and stirred in the lobster and all its juices.

We settled around our new mahogany table. We toasted our wine glasses and dove into the pasta. Each strand was coated with a complex layering of flavors, first the salty sea washed in my mouth, followed by the silky cheddar sauce, echoed by hints of garlic. The lobster was chewy and meat peeled away easily from its shell. I cracked the shell between my teeth and slurped up bits of tender lobster.


It’s been a while since I cooked a satisfying meal that didn’t consist of soup noodles and boiled wontons. It been even longer since my family cooked together. I’ve missed it. Being separated makes every meal taste even better, just like this lobster pasta.

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Lately

There has been Chai infused coffee cake

followed by mandatory Nap Time

at the stunning Niagara Falls.


There was also white sangria, concocted with white wine, ginger ale and pineapple juice

...shared with some special friends

and more cake. Like this uber creamy mango orange mousse cake.

There were buildings blanketed in white,

and snow settled on the crevices of everything in sight.

And nothing warms me up like a big bowl of soup noodles,

or spaghetti and meatballs.

And who says you can't have cookies for breakfast? Especially when they're Cornmeal raisin cookies with a cafe latte.

I've also been nursing my very own vanilla extract. It's estimated to be ready for use in 6 weeks, oh how I can't wait! *impatient twiddling of thumbs*

Meanwhile, I made some Benne Wafers. The original recipe failed me, each cookie metaphased with its net door neighbor. I added flour by the spoonful and finally rescued the latch batch; yet despite my frustrations, failures are still sweet.

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