It has a deep umami quality that comforts me to my core. It’s also a bit like the canned mushroom soup my father was once so fond of don’t let that put you off. We were still sad but at least we didn’t feel quite so empty inside.Īctually, my favorite version of this pasta isn’t the cauliflower one but a variant made with mushrooms and garlic and cream and wine that tastes the way I remember Italian restaurant food tasting in Britain in the 1980s. Fifteen minutes later, we were sitting down to a warming and savory tangle of linguini with chorizo and flecks of saffron-yellow cauliflower. When the children and I finally arrived home, we felt flat, grief-stricken, and insatiably hungry. Family members stood in a cold and empty parking lot trying to make gestures of love and sorrow to one another from behind our masks. Because of the pandemic, there was no food after the funeral. I made a version of it with cauliflower and chorizo for a late lunch the day of my father-in-law’s socially distanced funeral. It’s a dish that is very kind on the cook and you feel you are somehow pulling off a miracle. On those days when time and/or energy are scarce, you can rely on this formula to pull you through. And yet, I can’t urge you strongly enough to learn this technique and have it in your head for when you are in a pinch and you need a hot meal right now. On leisurely evenings, I still prefer the time-honored process of cooking the noodles and the sauce separately (a method that my youngest son now calls “Muggle Pasta” to distinguish it from “Magic Pasta”). This will never be my first-choice way to cook pasta. You just have to be careful to measure the ratio of pasta to water accurately, use a wide shallow frying pan or sauté pan (it won’t work in a tall narrow saucepan) and be generous with your seasoning. It works with any shape of pasta-but a good quality brand makes a big difference here-and almost any combination of vegetables and other flavorings such as anchovies or cured meats. The bonus of this technique-aside from incredible speed and ease and minimal washing up-is that the pasta is seasoned by the sauce as it cooks and becomes deeply flavored with wine, aromatics, stock-whatever you choose to add. But then I realized that the method is not really so far from a risotto. Surely it couldn’t be possible to cook the sauce and the pasta all at once in the same pan? It seemed to violate every rule in Italian cooking. When I first saw references to this all-in-one method of making pasta, I was sceptical.
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