Gluten Free Roasted Fennel and Sausage Pasta

So I took up the challenge.

After my last post, one of my readers suggested rather than going to a standard recipe for each region of Italy we will be visiting, pick an ingredient from that region and create a dish around it.  I mean, really, isn’t that what “Think Like A Chef” is all about?

I chose fennel, and on to the supermarket I went.

On the way to the store, I was thinking how could I cook it, and what would go well with it?  I knew I wanted pasta (gluten free, of course) somewhere in the dish, but how would I incorporate the fennel?  In the end, I decided to roast the fennel. 

Next decision?  What kind of sauce?  I had a couple of ways I could go here.  I could buy something canned – nah.  Next, I could make my own – maybe.  I could buy some tomatoes, seed and dice them, and use that – maybe.  Or…I could buy grape tomatoes, and roast them with the fennel, and put those of top of whatever it is that I am making.  Yes!

Now…protein.  Chicken is too obvious.  I decided that an Italian sausage would be good.  I chose to go with turkey sausage, so I could keep the fat content as low as possible.  Now, what kind of Italian sausage?  This may come as a surprise to some of my regular readers, but I decided to go with sweet rather than hot.  As you know, I like bold flavors, and I’m not put off by heat.  But in the past, every time I’ve cooked with Italian sausage, I always end up regretting not using the sweet sausage.  So really, that was a no brainer.

At this point, my brain took over and I wandered off to the Italian food section of my megamart.  Maybe there was something I could add to the dish?  Artichokes…maybe.  But maybe that would take away from the fennel.  Pine nuts?  Not a huge fan.  After going back and forth for about 15 minutes, I decided the KISS rule applies, and I decided to stick with my small list of ingredients.

So, first I roasted the fennel and the grape tomatoes, making sure to switch the position of the pan ½ way through.  I roasted them at 350 degrees, with some olive oil.  At the 20-minute mark, the fennel was almost done, but not quite, as they were still a bit too crunchy, and still retained a lot of the licorice flavor and not being sweet enough.  After five more minutes, they were just right.

In the meantime, I chopped up an onion and some garlic.  I was also boiling the water so the pasta could go in.  I took the casing off of the sausage and broke that up in a pan with a little bit of olive oil.  After that was cooked, in went the onion and the garlic.  By this time, the roasting of the vegetables was done, and was cooling off slightly, while the pasta went in the salted boiling water.  I managed to time it perfectly, and once the onions were cooked, the gluten free pasta went into a bowl, the sausage mixture went on top of that, and then op top of that went the roasted grape tomatoes and fennel, and I finished it off with some pecorino Romano cheese.

This is the result.

It was really good.  For sure, I think it was the prettiest dish I have come up with, and it tasted great.  The fennel had just enough crunch to it, to give the dish some texture, and I didn’t miss having a traditional sauce at all.  Cathy said, “This one’s a keeper!”

As for calories, one bowl is 539 calories with 14 grams of fat.  But 9 of the grams was from the olive oil, so really, most of the fat content was good fat.  If you left out the cheese, it would have been even less.

Next ingredient will be from Rome.  I will finally tackle artichokes.

Gluten Free Pasta E Fagioli

In one year, I will be traveling to Italy to celebrate my 25^th anniversary.  To get in the mood (really, who needs to be in the mood to go to Italy, but work with me here…), I thought it would be fun to cook three meals, one for each of the three cities we will be visiting.

The first city we will be visiting is Venice.  According to the website http://www.cookinvenice.com one of the top Venetian dishes is Pasta e Fasioi, more commonly known as Pasta e Fagioli.

Now, food-wise, grilling is a staple during the Memorial Day Weekend.  That being said, it still is…cold here in Boston.  I mean, even today it is “supposedly” 76 degrees outside, but it is very windy and cloudy, and kinda cold to sit outside with a good book.  So, a soup seemed like a good thing to have.

Now, I have never cooked Pasta e Fagioli, and haven’t had it since I went gluten free, so I couldn’t make up my own recipe.  I read a few different things about Pasta e Fagioli, and the same site I mentioned above says it is more like a creamy pudding than a soup.  I could not find a recipe that gave that impression, but I did find a recipe by Giada De Laurentiis that had some of the mixture pureed and put back in the soup, so I felt this was as close as I was going to get.

The first decision I had to make was about the choice of ham.  The recipe calls for pancetta.  Pancetta has roughly 360 calories for three ounces.  I wanted to cut the fat and the calories, so I chose to substitute prosciutto, which has roughly half the fat. 

The second decision was whether or not to use real butter or my butter/oil product.  I decided to use real butter, as I was saving calories by going with the prosciutto.  I also decided to use whipped butter.  Because it is whipped, it has more air in it.  Because there is air in it, a tablespoon of whipped butter has fewer calories than a tablespoon of whipped butter.  I thought this was a fair tradeoff.

Now, the recipe calls for adding a chopped onion, garlic, and the pancetta into a tablespoon of olive oil and a tablespoon of butter.  However, I discovered from my readings that prosciutto gets chewy if cooked too long.  So I did not add it until just before I added 5 ¾ cups of low sodium chicken stock, 29 ounces of red kidney beans that had been rinsed and drained, and a sachet that included rosemary, thyme, and a bay leaf.  I then covered it, brought it to a boil, and reduced the heat to a simmer.  After ten minutes, I took out one cup of the bean mixture and put it in a blender.

This was the first time I ever had to blend something that was a hot liquid, and watching cooking shows all these years obviously taught me that you need to be careful when blending a hot liquid, and that it can expand.  There was also a warning about it in the recipe, and I imagine this is a warning that is in every recipe they have that uses this technique.  I found this YouTube video showing the proper technique.

Meanwhile, while I was waiting for the blender mixture to cool down before blending, I added the gluten free macaroni.  I was quite pleased I was able to find this, and the taste was quite good.

I then blended the bean mixture and, once the macaroni was cooked, added it to the soup.  Now, I have to be honest here, while this may have made the soup creamier, it gave it kind of an…unattractive color.  It kinda sorta looked like baby food.  I was a little disappointed, because we do eat with our eyes.  In any case, I then seasoned with pepper and added a pinch of crushed red pepper for just bit of heat.

To serve, I ladled the soup into a bowl and sprinkled some Pecorino Romano on top, and then added some olive oil to finish it.  I added a small sprig of rosemary for garnish.

Despite the fact I didn’t think it looked all that good, and because of the blended bean mixture, I have to say it tasted quite good, and it did have something of a creamy taste to it.  The prosciutto added a good bit of salt.  I think if I were to make it again, I would use some sort of white bean, in an effort to make the dish more attractive.

As for calories, one bowl had 424 calories, which is pretty good, but had 18 grams of fat, about 41 percent.  This would have been less if I chose not to add the cheese and the olive oil at the end.

Next stop:  Florence!

Cajun Shrimp Tacos

I haven’t written a blog in quite a while.  Various physical issues have been haunting me for the last few months, for one reason or another.  The latest was a pinched nerve in my neck, which led to tremendous pain in my arm and my wife’s backside!

However, I am now feeling better, so it was time to get back in the kitchen! 

We recently spent a long weekend in New Orleans, which is my favorite place in the world to eat…at least of the places in the world I have been.  I am a big “bold flavor” kind of guy.  For instance, I like French food, but sometimes I think I may be missing something because of the subtleness of the flavors.  Give me a hearty gumbo, or a crawfish boil any day of the week, and I’m happy.

With this in mind, I decided to try to use some of those flavors, and decided to make Cajun Shrimp Tacos, with a Cajun Remoulade Slaw.

The shrimp was fairly easy.  I just covered them with Emeril’s “Essence” seasoning for about 15 minutes or so, while I made the slaw.  I bought precut slaw, but the dressing was made of low fat mayo, low fat sour cream, paprika, cayenne, Dijon mustard, and cider vinegar. (With all apologies, I can’t recall what chef I got this recipe from.)

Then I cooked the shrimp in a bit of grape seed oil, about a minute or so on each side, while heating some corn tortillas.

The assembly was the shrimp on the bottom of the tortilla, topped with the slaw.

On the good side, I really liked my idea of the slaw.  My thought was that, if it wasn’t for the slaw, the dish would be all one note, texture wise.  The slaw gave a nice crunch to an otherwise soft dish.

The bad side was I used too much heat in the slaw.  My intention was to have something that would cool down the shrimp.  Emeril Lagasse actually has a remoulade recipe that I have used before, which is not quite as hot as what I made this time, so I think I might go that route instead next time.

Calorie wise, the dish was not bad at all.  Two tacos using small Corn Tortillas ended up 328 calories, 10 grams of fat.  I will make this again, but with a different remoulade sauce.

I would also add that we had some slaw leftover, and later in the week we made chicken paninis and put the slaw on those…it was fantastic!

Sweet Note Bagels

One of the things that I have missed since going gluten free six years ago is bagels.  Particularly, “everything” bagels.  Maybe it is because of the area I grew up in, but to me, there are not too many things better than an “everything” bagel with cream cheese and lox.

Over the past few years, I have tried various gluten free bagels.  Some pre-made, some that had to be cooked.  I always tried to find one that actually tasted like a bagel, however, at the end of the day, I always ended up going with Udi’s bagels.

About six months back, I tried an “everything” bagel from Katz gluten free.  As I have said in the past, I don’t really like to put down any item that can help people be gluten free.  That being said, I found the Katz bagels to be “okay.”  They were quite thin…in fact so thin I found them difficult to slice.  I tried everything including toasting them whole, but nothing worked, so back to Udi’s I went.

A couple of months back, I found I had a new “follower” on my Twitter account, and it was a company called Sweet Note Bagels.  Of course, this caught my interest.  I went to their website, which you can see here.  Michelle MacDonald and Brittany Nettles run the company.  Needless to say, the bagels on their site looked AMAZING.  I quickly “followed” them back and contacted them about buying some of their bagels.  They told me they were not yet shipping to Massachusetts, but would contact me as soon as they were.  Two weeks ago, they contacted me, to let me know they could now ship to my state.  A week later, my wife ordered “everything” bagels for me and some sesame bagels for a gluten free colleague at work.

This past Wednesday, they arrived.  I opened them and put them in the freezer as instructed, and ate dinner.  Less than ten minutes after dinner ended, I had one of the “everything” bagels.  Since then, I have had two more.

The first thing you notice is that they are smaller than Udi’s bagels, but they are much heavier and denser.  One of the things I haven’t liked about Udi’s bagels is that I sometimes felt like I was eating bread with a different type of crust on it, so I liked the fact that the Sweet Note bagels had some body to them. 

The directions say to thaw them in the microwave for 45 to 60 seconds.  I think this depends on your microwave.  We seem to have a fairly powerful one, so 60 seconds was too long, but 45 was just right.  They are also thinner than Udi’s, but not so thin that you couldn’t slice them once defrosted. 

Now the most important thing:  How did they taste?  Well, for me, these are by far the best gluten free bagels I have tried.  They toasted great!  Crispy on the outside, cooked through but still slightly chewy on the inside, with tons of flavor from everything that goes onto an “everything” bagel.  I’m not the least bit ashamed to say I had two yesterday, and if it wasn’t for the fact we were going out to dinner, I probably would have had another…and another.

So here is my recommendation: hook up with these ladies…okay, let me rephrase that - contact this wonderful company on their website, on Twitter, wherever you can.  Find out if they ship to your state.  If they don’t, ask them to contact you when they can.  Then buy them, and enjoy them to your hearts content.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to eat an “everything” bagel from Sweet Note Bagels with a shmear of cream cheese.

An Open Letter To Donatella Arpaia

Dear Donatella,

Hi! It’s me, Mike.  I hope everything is going well for you!

I just wanted to let you know how much fun it was meeting you at the Mohegan Sun Wine Fest. 

The evening started out great.  Typically, my wife Cathy and our friend Jan sit at a table, while Leslie and I get food and wine, and bring it back to share.  (If I can, because, as I had mentioned to you, I am gluten sensitive so I need to be REALLY careful!) 

Anyway, Leslie and I had a great time getting some fantastic food from Chefs like Kim Canteenwalla, Mary Ann Esposito, Betty Fraser, Christopher Coombs, Michele Ragussis, and so on.  There was even a table of entirely gluten free desserts.  Leslie and I love to speak to all of the Chefs, if only for a few seconds, and they are all accommodating.

But for some odd reason…I get shy whenever we go to your table.  The same thing happened last year.

While standing in line, Leslie said to me, “So what if I say…”

“No, don’t say anything.”

“But what if I just tell Donatella…”

“No, stop!”

“Okay Mike, I won’t say a word.”

I, of course, should not have trusted her, but it was still a shock when Leslie said, “Mike really likes you, but he’s scared to tell you.”  To which you replied, “Oh, really?”  The blood immediately rushed to my face, out of embarrassment, I’m sure!  I tried to make small talk by telling you that I follow you on Twitter.  Then you said, “Would you like to take a picture?”

Not thinking straight, I immediately thought a picture of you, but then I realized you had graciously offered to take a picture with me. 

I had mentioned that I probably could not try your meatball, because I am gluten free.  You then told me that you are coming out with a gluten free pizza dough.  You told me to tweet out our picture, which I did, at the same time telling those who follow me that you are coming out with the gluten free pizza dough.  And then you re-tweeted “Just For You.”  I mean, really…how cool of you to do that!

I’m not sure you knew it or not, but you also tweeted out a video, which I am right in the middle of.  Are you flirting with me?  I mean, we ARE both married!

Donatella, I don’t know if you will read this, but just in case you do, I just want to thank you.  You turned a very fun night into something extra special for me.  You are truly a very classy person, and I will always appreciate the kindness you showed me.

Thanks again!

Mike

P.S.  You don’t happen to know Paul McCartney, do you?  Because, if you could introduce me to him, my life would be complete!