Meal 23: Tagliatelle carbonara, cod & green pepper sandwich, almond soup w/ice cream

What is Tagliatelle?  Also, the kids heard that I was doing “fish” again from THAT cookbook — and bailed. Uh, dad — we’ve got to go color eggs with the kids at the Holy Saturday camp…  Must have been the squid tentacles from last time. They DID stay for first course — Mario Batalli’s Carbonara recipe is a semiweekly staple here, and is crack for kids. The threat of more creepy seafood bothered them, but they knew better than ditch a good Carbonara.

Here we go:

First course is dead on: don’t fudge, just do what the pictures tell you, and use the proportions called out — particularly the salt and pepper in the bacon/cream sauce (is that sauce EVEN LEGAL?) I held back on the salt, thinking the bacon would handle that — but it really didn’t — it still needed just a bit of salt to set it off. Just a knock out — everybody oohed and aahed — pasta doesn’t get much more sinful than this.

I did try to run the wikipedia article for Tagliatelle past the local merchants, but it rang NO bells. I did finally source some Chinese “eggnoodles” recently, and thought “hell, I’ll just check the cooking time on those and use them. But, as the culinary gods would have it, apparently “eggnoodles” from Hong Kong only contain “wheat flour and tapioca flour” — no mention of eggs. ODD.

I did find that the ordinary wavy/short egg noodles — for the traditional casserole application, found in the Italian section of most supermarkets — cook in the same time as called out in the recipe, so I went with that. No, they aren’t anywhere as long as what’s in the picture, but they cooked up just fine.

Second course: “fish sandwich” — basically a breaded piece of fried Cod on top of a fried pepper (I ended up using poblano peppers) on top of a piece of toasted bread, served open face with mayonnaise. Unbelievably good, in a humble, solid, authentic sort of way — really great.

Third course: you make an almond milk, whisk in some sugar, and serve that with a nutty ice cream and candied almonds. We went with honey roasted almonds and walnut ice cream. In Adriá’s method, you take peeled almonds and grind them into a rough meal, then soak that meal in water for 12 hours.  After that you use an immersion blender to puree that into a milk (after straining it out.)

I’ve had some experience with the Matthew Kenney style raw vegan diet, and know for a fact that you can make a kick ass almond milk in a more straightforward way — but not having the whole almonds, I used almond flour, soaked that in water, strained it, and went from there. The only observation is that the almond milk is great with the ice cream and candied almonds, but was a little grainy. Nothing to freak out about.

Very good.