Campanelle with Sausage and Red Bell Pepper proves what a blank canvas and invitation to improvise pasta can be. Recipe below.

Sometimes a cookbook can greatly influence how you cook, even if you never make a single recipe from it. We had a pasta cookbook around the house for years and finally got rid of it in one of our periodic purges when we realized we never used it. Ever. But the author said something in the introduction that completely changed the way I thought about pasta, so it wasn’t money wasted, as far as I was concerned.

His family lived in Italy for a year when he was a boy. Their housekeeper made pasta at least once a day, every day, for that year. In that time, she never made what many of us think of as the classic Italian pasta with red sauce, not once. And she never repeated herself.

When I got over being stunned and amazed by this feat—and it wasn’t a blinding flash of inspiration, but rather a long process of seeing various recipes in various sources, perusing menus in Italian restaurants and, finally, just facing ingredients on hand in my own kitchen—I realized that pasta can be like the perfect basic jazz melody that invites countless amazing improvisations.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good red sauce. It’s just that there are so many other more interesting things to be done with pasta. There are various cream sauces, for instance, and dishes that involve baking the pasta. I’ll save those for another day. Today I’m going to cover a breathtakingly simple technique that will give you all the room in the world to improvise and create your own wonderful meal. Continue reading “Blue Kitchen: Playing with your food” →