Benvenuti

Over the next four days I'm taking a class called Benvenuti.  It's designed to teach people about living and getting around Vicenza and Italy.  Today we mainly went over the course schedule and learned a few Italian phrases, but we also cooked our lunch.  We had pasta with a simple tomato sauce, a salad, and a roasted peper dish.  Everything was delicious! 

Here are the cooking tips and directions I picked up:

The key to cooking pasta is cooking it in plenty of water.  You should cook your pasta in a large pot with lots of water, even if you aren't cooking a lot.  Smaller pots and not enough water is what makes the pasta gummy.  Also, add salt to the water before you put the pasta in.  It gives the pasta more flavor.

The cooking time on our pasta today was 12 minutes, but we took it out at 9.  This is because you want it to have a little bite to it, but also, the pasta will keep cooking some after you take it out of the water. 

Once you drain the pasta, put a little bit of olive oil on it so it doesn't stick together. 

While our pasta was cooking we started our tomato sauce.  It couldn't have been any easier.  We put cherry tomatos (halved), fresh basil, garlic, salt and olive oil in a pan and simply cooked it all down.  Once the tomatoes started to break down we transfered the contents to a pot and used an immersion blender to change the consistency to a smoother sauce (like a marinara). 

Any type of tomato can be used, we just used cherry tomatoes because they currently have really good ones at the commissary.  This sauce can also be served without blending it, or can be made into a creamier sauce by adding milk or heavy cream. 

We put the pasta in the sauce pan, and slowly stirred the sauce over it, mixing it all together with a little parmesan cheese.  Italians mix their pasta and sauce together.  They find it very odd to eat it the way we do, by dipping the pasta on the plate, and then putting the sauce on top. 

I will never, ever buy tomato sauce again.  This was the most simple thing to make and it tasted so much better than any tomato sauce I've ever purchased.  It seriously took 10 minutes.  The only thing I might try differently would be cooking a little onion with it, just to try to incorporate another flavor, but honestly, it was delicious just the way we made it. 

The roasted pepper dish was also wonderful and so simple.  First, you take yellow or red peppers (she said anything but green...I'm not sure why) and you cut them in half, taking out the seeds and stem.  Then you put them, skin side up, under the broiler and char the skin.  Once they cool, peel off the skin.  Then, cut the peppers into strips, and add them to a pan with some garlic and a little olive oil.  Top them with bread crumbs and parmesan cheese.  Bake the dish until its golden brown. 

We found that the peppers were even good when we mixed them with the pasta. 

Both of the dishes were so easy to make and I know they are going to become some of my "go to" recipes.  I would love for people back home to try these dishes out and let me know what you think!  See if you'll be making the switch from Ragu, too!