Sunday Recipe: Capellini with Brussel Sprouts and Pancetta

I haven't mentioned this here, but I am a whore for Top Chef. Seriously. I love it almost as much as I love hockey. I love most of the challenges and often think, "what would I make given those parameters?" Even though I have zero experience with large-scale event cooking and have never worked in a restaurant kitchen, and in the full knowledge that I would, no doubt, screw up everything, every step along the way, I still think it. I don't have any fancy gagetry and I don't work with liquid nitrogen. I loathe foams.

I know my limitations. I am purely a home cook.

But if the challenges were scaled back and the parameters were, 'meet the elements of this challenge in your own kitchen for six people kind of thing,' i.e., cook for this challenge on a small scale and, well, you can see the mental hoops I put myself through watching the show.

This season, the Top Chef All-Stars has been a blast, because they brought back contestants who did very well, but didn't win, so viewers like myself were familiar with the chefs and there were no truly out-classed contestants that made me think, "seriously, why are you here?!" And I actually missed some of them, Jennifer Carroll, the magnificent Carla Hall, Dale Talde, Fabio Viviani and, of course, the Black Hammer, Antonia Lofaso.

Two weeks ago, the nine chefs that remained had a challenge to do family style dinner service at Rao's in NYC (which is how Rao's does service. Big tables. Family style). And this time, I could have crushed the Rao's challenge because it was food to be served family style, because it was, essentially, Italian comfort food.

Three chefs had the antipasti course, three had the primi (or pasta course) and three had the secondi (meat course.) So many options, so many possibilities. And yet, across the board, the three chefs who each had to make a pasta dish f*cked it up. How the hell do you f*ck up pasta? Not to say it doesn't take skill -- it does. But these are great chefs, right? How do you screw up a pasta course?

One of the messed up pasta courses was courtesy of Dale Talde, who I think is very talented and I love watching him cook, but he screwed up his tagliatelli with brussel sprouts beyond repair. First, he made awful homeade pasta. You could see it without even tasting it -- it looked mealy and dry; if you've made pasta even twice in your life, you would have known to just scrap that dough altogether. Then, the shitty pasta was under-sauced and dressed sort of like a salad, instead of cooked properly in the sauce.

Watching it, I kept thinking -- but that should be good. The flavor profiles would be awesome. I love brussel sprouts. I love pancetta. What, I said to myself, is not to like? Assuming you don't just f*ck it up royally, that is.

So, with apologies to Dale, here's a great take on his dish, using dried pasta which makes for a fast and delicious dinner on a work-night.

You will need:
12-18 brussel sprouts
1/4 pound of pancetta (cut in one thick piece, if possible)
5 cloves of garlic
pinch of crushed red pepper
1 pound of dried pasta - I used whole wheat capellini, but use whatever variety you prefer

The prep:
Clean the brussels and quarter them (or half them if they are petite). Toss them in boiling, salted water and cook until they are almost, but not quite tender. I had to take one out and eat it to test it (because I'm a moron, so you may not need to do that.) The point is, you want them to be just a hair away from being cooked, but not quite there, because they'll cook some more in your sautee pan.

Clean the garlic and add it to a deep sautee pan with hot oil. You want to cook the garlic and then you're going to remove it, so don't bother trying to dice it or anything. Just smash the cloves to get the skins off and toss them in there whole.

Cube the pancetta into a fine dice. You want little pieces of pancetta all through the dish. Add the pancetta to the garlic and oil and really cook it down to render the fat from the pancetta. When the pancetta are crisp little cubes of porky goodness, remove the garlic, add the brussels and a pinch of crushed red pepper.

Cook the pasta in a pot of thoroughly salted water at a rolling boil.

Add about a ladle full of pasta water to the pancetta and brussel sprouts and let that reduce. Remove the pasta before it's al dente and add it to your sautee pan to finish for about 1 to 2 minutes.

Serve with grated parmesan or pecorino romano, whichever you prefer. Top Chef worthy, I tells ya.

Thoughts on Cooking, Sports and Michael Pollan

From True/Slant on August 2, 2009:

Why Lidia Bastianich Is More Like Candace Parker Than She Knows

Damn you, Michael Pollan. Just damn you for your New York Times Sunday magazine piece on food, cooking shows and how much, or how little, we all cook. In short, the essence of Pollan’s argument is that we cook less, watch more, and have essentially turned cooking into a spectator sport. What I found most interesting was Pollan’s take on the way competitive food shows are presented because I’ve been thinking about it for months. I watch a ridiculous amounts of sports programming, which I rationalize as being work. But I’m a cooking show junkie. I admit it, shows like Bravo’s “Top Chef” and the Food Network’s “Iron Chef America,” which bring together cooking and competition have me hooked. And Pollan knows why: they’re like crack for my sports jonesing heart and I am Iron Chef Mario Batali’s bitch.

It’s like Pollan crawled inside my brain when he wrote:

"Whether in the Kitchen Stadium or on “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star” or, over on Bravo, “Top Chef,” cooking in prime time is a form of athletic competition, drawing its visual and even aural vocabulary from “Monday Night Football.” On “Iron Chef America,” one of the Food Network’s biggest hits, the cookingcaster Alton Brown delivers a breathless (though always gently tongue-in-cheek) play by play and color commentary, as the iron chefs and their team of iron sous-chefs race the clock to peel, chop, slice, dice, mince, Cuisinart, mandoline, boil, double-boil, pan-sear, sauté, sous vide, deep-fry, pressure-cook, grill, deglaze, reduce and plate — this last a word I’m old enough to remember when it was a mere noun. A particularly dazzling display of chefly “knife skills” — a term bandied as freely on the Food Network as “passing game” or “slugging percentage” is on ESPN — will earn an instant replay: an onion minced in slo-mo. Can we get a camera on this, Alton Brown will ask in a hushed, this-must-be-golf tone of voice. It looks like Chef Flay’s going to try for a last-minute garnish grab before the clock runs out! Will he make it? [The buzzer sounds.] Yes!"

Oh yes, Michael, oh yes. I love it. I love the skill of the competitors. I love seeing creative and inventive chefs like Batali thrive under severe time constraints or given odd ingredients. I love examining the implicit strategies of each Iron Chef, worthy of the most complex NFL offensive gameplans. I love watching Top Chef contestants improvise like a great hockey winger taking advantage of a breakdown or flukey bounce. I love watching chefs and sous chefs work in tandem the way a great offensive line does. And just as much, I love watching a single chef banging it out of the park like Roger Maris. Clearly, these producers have learned how to package food shows by watching CBS’ March Madness coverage and Fox’s NFL coverage.

But it’s not just the structure and the competition. As much as those shows appeal to me, I grew up watching Julia Child teach American women how to cook. It was stripped down, elemental, educational cooking. I loved it. Even today, there remain a few chefs who work along Child’s model, with no bells and whistles. To me, Lidia Bastianich is a first ballot, unanimous Hall of Famer in the cooking world and her PBS cooking show, “Lidia’s Italy” is about as bare bones, old school, educational as you can get. So it’s not just about the flash and dash and ESPN-like production values. It’s about the food.

But why watch Lidia cook when I could actually, you know, be cooking? I watch her for the same reason I watch the Duke-UNC basketball games, and the same reason that I sit breathlessly rapt through wall to wall NFL coverage on Sundays from noon until midnight. You could kill every announcer on the planet, disappear every sports producer in North America, set up two cameras and a mike courtside and I’d still tune in to watch the UConn-Rutgers women’s basketball game. I’d tune in because those players and those teams can do things I can’t do. Yeah, I can play football or basketball and there’s nothing wrong with a rec league game of hoops or a three on three game of backyard football. And while I can run a fade route, I can’t run one like Larry Fitzgerald. I can play a game of one on one basketball, but I sure can’t ball like Candace Parker.

I watch Larry Fitz and Parker, not only for the competition, but for their excellence. The same is true for cooking greats.

I’m a good cook and I like to cook. I grew up making homeade ravioli and gnocchi and having spent decades up to my armpits in flour, eggs and cheese, I’ve even mastered them. But gnocchi and ravs are special occasion foods and I’m a regular, everyday cook. I’d like to think I have some skill in that arena; maybe even some panache and soul. But I’m still no Lidia.

I’m backyard superstar tossing a football around on a late summer evening. Lidia Bastianich is Joe Montana.