Another recipe originally published in Damned Intellectuals:
Easy Heat
October, 2003
I’m not very good about keeping the larder stocked. It’s a New York thing, I’ve decided. Or maybe it’s a living-in-a-sixth-floor-walk-up thing. Probably both. By the time I get through the work day I’m usually too tired to contemplate stopping at a grocery store and then hauling the bags upstairs, so I tend to do what too many New Yorkers do—go out for dinner. This gets old. Sometimes you just want to kick off your shoes, shrug out of the consultant clothes and refuse to move. When you get hungry you curse your own laziness and rummage through the cupboards hoping something has changed since you last took inventory. If you have dried red chili peppers, garlic, olive oil and pasta on hand you’ve got a meal in the making. Even if you only have red chili flakes, you can fake a decent dish.
Aglio, Olio e Peperoncino
Peel 4 garlic cloves and chop one of them. Heat ½ a cup of olive oil in a skillet and toss in the remaining 3 garlic cloves with 3 to 6 small dried chili peppers (you’ll have to estimate the heat of the peppers—I usually have very fierce ones on hand and use only 3). Let the garlic and peppers sizzle for about 3 minutes—the peppers should swell and blister a bit. Remove them from the oil and begin crushing them in a mortar. Add the oil they cooked in a little at a time as you crush the garlic and peppers until you have an oily paste. You can substitute about a teaspoon (or more if you like) of chili flakes.
Leaving the chili/garlic paste aside, heat another 1/4 cup of olive oil to the skillet and sauté the chopped garlic for about a minute. Add the chili/garlic paste, sauté for another few minutes and remove the skillet from the heat.
In the meantime, cook a pound of pasta (any kind). Before you drain it, reserve ½ a cup of the water you cooked it in.
Put the drained pasta in a bowl and toss it with the chili/garlic mixture and as much of the reserved pasta-water as you think necessary.
Comments