Linguine with raw tuna: Beautiful but blah

In today’s “Cooking Off the Cuff” at WashingtonPost.com, I write about a really delicious tuna dish made in a kind of Sicilian style – including the doneness of the fish, which is cooked through but still nice and moist. Prepared this way, the fish stands up beautifully to the very flavorful garnish/sauce of tomatoes, garlic, olives and herbs.

A week or so later, I had what seemed like a brilliant idea for dinner using similar ingredients, this time in a pasta dish. But it turned out to be not so brilliant: I ignored my own advice about using cooked-through tuna with these strong flavors.

The idea was to make a pasta sauce very much like the garnish for the tuna dish I wrote about in The Post, then to add, at the table, diced raw tuna, which I figured would cook a bit in the heat of the linguine. It looked gorgeous, like little jewels (or maybe diced gummi bears). 

But the little points of blandness among all the higher flavors were almost disgusting. Dressing raw tuna with big flavors is one thing; putting it in a standalone environment of equally big flavors is quite another. An interesting lesson: Next time I’ll give the diced tuna a quick sauté, then add it to the sauce.

One successful thing about that dish (which was lovely apart from the tuna) was that I "filleted" the tomatoes beforehand and cooked the goo and seeds with herbs, garlic and lots of oil, then pressed this through a strainer and added it to the sauce when the time came. 

Delicious – I could have dressed pasta with this on its own or spooned it onto grilled bread. It reminded me of a lobster sauce base but without the lobster, if you see what I mean: viscous, concentrated, flavorsome.

Leftovers + leftovers = cannelloni

Today I peered into the refrigerator and found leftover potatoes from this and leftover turnip greens from a dish that will eventually be featured in “CookingOff the Cuff” over at The Washington Post. We’re going away for a couple weeks, and if I’d put those things into the freezer neither would have been worth defrosting. Just imagine a container of grainy, watery frozen boiled potatoes. What a thought!

I didn’t want to throw them away, of course, and I got to thinking about variations on bubble and squeak: We could have had something like that with fried eggs. Or I could have combined the vegetables with beaten eggs and made a frittata or a Spanish tortilla, which I could have topped with a spoonful of tomato sauce (a little of which remained in the fridge too).

The tomato sauce, however, made me think of pasta; the problem would be to integrate the potatoes without pushing the resulting dish over the top. Then I recalled that one (though by no means the only) way to make a sensible pasta dish with both potatoes and greens is to roll them up into cannelloni – which could be topped with the tomato sauce and baked.

So that’s what I did: I made an egg and a half’s worth of pasta dough, rolled it out, cut it into squares (well, more or less squares) and parboiled it. I put the turnip greens and potatoes (and some leftover arugula salsa verde) into the food processor and pulsed until everything was broken up. To that mixture I added a handful of grated pecorino, tasted the result and added some more pecorino. The cheese also tightened the mixture, which had inherited a fair bit of liquid from those greens.

I spooned portions of this onto the partially cooked pasta squares/rectangles (which I’d dried on a towel), rolled them up, laid them into an oiled baking pan, topped them with tomato sauce thinned with vegetable stock and baked them, covered with aluminum foil, in a 360 F (180 C) oven for half an hour.

Then I removed the foil, sprinkled the top with grated pecorino and a few slivered sage leaves and baked for another 15 minutes.

This turnip and potato filling made delicious cannelloni, and the few tablespoons of salsa verde in the mixture lent an unusual tart/savory dimension. And we ate them all up: there was not a leftover in sight.

Hanging the laundry - and the pasta - out to dry

The little pasta drying gizmo I have is perfect for a Manhattan apartment. It is made of wooden dowels, breaks down into something that will slide into a narrow cupboard and is big enough for most purposes.

But once in a while I need more fresh pasta than it will hold comfortably, and I've improvised various stopgaps over the years. Then our friend Barbara gave Jackie a most useful birthday present: a Leifheit drying rack that holds quite a lot of laundry but folds pretty flat. Also perfect for a Manhattan apartment. At some point it dawned on me that what’s good for socks and tee-shirts is probably good for lasagne too. It is. When fully unfolded, the rack can hold vast quantities of rolled-out noodles. And the plastic-coated wire rods are easy to clean: we wouldn’t want to get flour onto our navy blue sweaters, would we?

More on leafy greens and tomatoes

Expanding a little on today’s Washington Post “Cooking Off the Cuff” - http://wapo.st/s010kU - I should say that until a couple of years ago I was strangely repelled by the idea of adding tomatoes to leafy green vegetables of any kind. It just seemed creepy. Even the sauces for my favorite versions of stuffed cabbage were sauerkraut-based and tomato-free; tomato with stuffed cabbage, perhaps, was a reminder of too many dreadful bar mitzvah receptions.

            But then, during an e-mail exchange, a friend assured me that greens like Swiss chard and the various kales are perfectly happy to coexist with tomatoes and that I should do as millions of other people do and give it a whirl. So I did, and of course the outcome was delicious. What you need to pay attention to (as ever) is the salt: you must make sure that there’s enough to balance the acidity added by the tomatoes. Once you’ve taken care of that, you’re fine.

            On balance, I still prefer the less complicated flavors of my old standby greens: a little garlic and chili, perhaps some guanciale or pancetta, and plenty of olive oil, both as a cooking fat and, uncooked, as a last-minute finishing touch. But, as I found by combining Tuscan kale / cavolo nero with a fairly classic sauce for pasta all’amatriciana, a well balanced dish of greens with tomatoes is a grand thing.