More New Dishes

Two new dishes from the Union Square Cafe cookbook that were both keepers. Both are considered appetizers but we are eating them as double servings for main courses, or supplementing with a bit of bread. The first dish is "Pappardelle of Zucchini", which is a pasta dish without the pasta. The finely sliced zucchini acts as the pasta. I don't have a mandoline so we tried using the food processor to finely slice the zucchini lengthwise but it didn't do any better job than I could have done by hand. I used some of my homemade tomato sauce that I always have on hand (frozen in cup sized bags in the freezer). The dish turned out simple and delicious. I am starting to understand what the chefs mean when they say "It's all about a few, well chosen, simple and fresh ingredients." The second was much more hearty ("rustic" was the word used in the recipe): "Braised Escarole and White Beans with Tomatoes, Mushrooms and Pecorino". Neither of us knew what escarole was but we found it at the Bloom grocery store. It is a type of bitter tasting (when raw) lettuce. I thought it was strange that we were going to be cooking lettuce, but after looking on the internet I learned that Italians braise escarole all the time. The first part of this recipe required making a homemade tomato sauce using just raw tomatoes that are chopped and cooked down for 15 minutes, and then passed through a food mill to extract the tomato puree. What a hassle. I don't have a food mill so I used a plastic strainer and pushed the tomatoes through it using the back of a plastic soup ladle, holding back the skins and the seeds. It took quite a while but the results were worth it. Way better than canned sauce. To this we added fresh basil, rosemary, onion and garlic, and the tomato sauce was complete. In the end it was a very nice sauce, very different from my normal recipe (the one that I freeze all the time). We had a few Italian Peroni beers, and Andrew liked the meal so much that he ate all of tonights servings (it was supposed to be a 2 day meal).