The concept is this

Is anyone up for a lasagna today? I'm thinking a summer-in-the-winter, put-up pesto and tomato sauce and homemade bechamel type of gig. Takers? Yes? Ok.

There's only one hitch. I made this about a month ago, and although I can still remember the fabulous August brightness of the tomatoes and the way the pesto made me feel like maybe, just maybe it might be time for a pond swim that afternoon, I did not exactly write down the recipe. Not that I had a recipe to begin with, which is why I think this might be okay. The thing about lasagna is, you really don't need a recipe. You need to understand the concept, and the concept is this:

Find a box of noodles, the thick, flat kind with crinkly edges made for lasagna (or make some yourself). Get out a 9" by 13" casserole dish, and butter it up. Go down to your freezer, or open your pantry, and pull out a pint of that fantastic tomato sauce you made back when you couldn't even imagine the meaning of the words Wintery Mix. While you're at it, grab a half cup or so of the pesto you made with your neighbor's extra basil. Now root around in the fridge and hope for some milk, and butter, and mozzarella, and grab a few spoonfuls of flour and make a bechamel sauce. (Preferably this one, but if you have your own favorite, you just need a similar amount.)

At this point you could also get out some frozen spinach or pick some fresh from the greenhouse, and cook it down with a little bit of olive oil and garlic. Or maybe you have a freezer full of sundried tomatoes. Or, you could be into sauteed mushrooms. Whatever you're feeling here, go with it.


Finally, heat up a pot of water, add a pinch of salt, and boil those noodles. Now comes the hard part: drain the noodles, put them back in the pot, and drizzle some olive oil over them. The noodles will be hot, painfully hot, but if you're like me, you won't have any dishgloves so you'll go ahead and burn your hands, because you need to work quickly before they all stick together in a glob.

Spread a tiny blob of bechamel across the bottom of the casserole dish. Put a layer of noodles on top. Then a layer of tomato sauce, then more noodles, then maybe a few dollops of pesto and whatever vegetables you've got. Then another layer of noodles, and a smooth one of bechamel, and so on and so on. Until you've got a big, layered sandwich of tomatoes and noodles and pesto and vegetables and creamy, delightful sauce. Then, when you get to the top, layer on some slices of mozzarella and maybe even a bit of grated Parmesan.

And there you go. You've got yourself an oven-ready Winter-Into-Summer Lasagna. Happy Monday, everyone, and happy almost-March. Only 22 days until spring!

A terribly silly mistake

Hi.

Would you like to talk about pesto tortellini today? Good. Because while I tried, really I did, to cultivate an interest in chili dogs and men in tights and oddly orange jalapeño cheese dip, last night I failed only one beer in. I actually went to a separate room to sit sober and write wedding thank-you notes. It was a sorry, sorry state of affairs.

These pesto tortellini, on the other hand, went much better. In fact, I think I'd even go so far as to say they were a tremendous, out-and-out, smash hit. They might have been slightly time-consuming, and a little bit finicky, but they made the best work lunch I have had in months. I don't say this about many things, but they tasted, in a good way, like they came from a box. So I think that instead of the Super Bowl, we should focus on them.

I've been wanting these pesto tortellini for months, ever since we bought some in Charles de Gaulle on the way home from our honeymoon. They were outrageously expensive, and packaged in plastic, and drenched in cold, congealed, alfredo sauce, and somehow, they were superb. We had left our hotel in Rome without breakfast on what seemed, after the driving and the flight, like maybe another day, or even another trip, so that could have been it, and we were also headed onto an eight-and-a-half-hour flight. We had no food, and no idea that Air France is secretly a five-star restaurant that serves wine with your meal and cognac as an after dinner drink, and so we decided to stock up. We then astonished ourselves by eating the whole Air France plate and all of the tortellini, and declaring it far and away the most enjoyable in-transmit meal of our lives.

When we got home, I did not forget the experience. I craved pesto tortellini the way I wished we were still in Paris, and they both seemed equally out of reach. And then on Christmas day, my parents gave Alex and me a beautiful, hardcover, full-color Italian cookbook. It took me precisely one month to reach the page that showed a man folding squares of pasta into tiny, handmade tortellini, and exactly two hours longer to get to work.

Once I finished, I had a hard time remembering what had seemed so daunting in the first place. It couldn't have been the pasta dough, because I've rolled out fettuccine and spaghetti and even angel hair plenty of times before. It most definitely couldn't have been the pesto, seeing as our (new! accurate!) freezer inventory sheet clearly states that we have a whole seven cups of basil and Parmesan and pine nuts and garlic already whipped up. It must have been the cutting, and the folding, and the squeezing, which as you can see was a terribly silly mistake.

Tortellini, as it turns out, are very much within reach. My reach, and your reach, and your grandmother's reach, and even your ten-year-old son's. They are a project, yes, but a fun one, and especially delightful because you get to eat your results. That is always an excellent criteria, I think. So if you don't mind, I'm going to show you some pictures and give you some instructions and turn you loose.

Enjoy.

PESTO TORTELLINI

Ok. In order for maximum success, it might be a good idea to look at some pictures before you get started. If I were you, I would download this guide from Cook's Illustrated, which has a lot of very helpful step-by-step pictures, in particular the ones on the right side of the third page with numbers in the 3s entitled "Making Tortellini." Have you looked at that? Good. We can get started with the pasta dough now. Here are the ingredients:

1 pound all-purpose flour
5 eggs at room temperature
water as needed
8 ounces pesto
1 tablespoon olive oil or butter
grated Parmesan cheese (0ptional)

Measure the flour into a large mixing bowl. Make a well in the center, and crack the eggs into the hole. Mix the eggs with a fork, whisking carefully, and slowly begin to bring in some flour. Continue whisking flour into the eggs until the mixture gets too thick to whisk; then work the eggs and remaining flour together into a dough using your hands. If the dough is too dry, add water, but take care not to go overboard. A good dough is moist but it should never stick to your fingers. (If it does, it will also stick to the pasta crank, and you will have quite a mess on your hands.) Knead the dough on a lightly floured counter-top until it is completely smooth. Break off a small, fist-sized piece; cover the rest with plastic wrap and set it aside.

Use a pasta crank to roll out the dough into a long, thin sheet. (We have this machine, and I usually pass it through settings one through seven before I decide it's thin enough.) Lay the sheet of pasta out flat on the (still lightly floured) counter-top and cut it into one-and-a-half-inch squares using either a knife or, if you have one, a pasta bike. Use a 1/4-teaspoon measuring spoon to scoop a tiny dollop of pesto into the center of each square. Working quickly so that the pasta does not dry out (if it does it will no longer stick to itself easily), gently fold the squares into triangles. Press the two open edges of the triangles together to seal the pesto in, taking care not to push the filling out.

Now comes the fun part: fold the bottom two corners of the triangle together and squeeze so that they stick, and congratulate yourself on making your first batch of tortellini.

(If you like, you can also fold the top corner of the triangle down backward. It makes the tortellini look more traditional, but it isn't entirely necessary. I kind of liked the way my tortellini looked with their top corners up—like the three cornered hats my sister and I got in Williamsburg when we were kids. Also, I had a hard time keeping the pasta wet enough to fold when I took the time to turn down the tops.)

Continue repeating this process—rolling out a thin sheet of dough, cutting it into squares, and filling and folding them, until you have either exhausted yourself or used up all of the dough and pesto. If you have extra dough, you can wrap it in plastic wrap and it will be fine in the fridge for a day or so. If you aren't ready to cook them yet, the tortellini will also be okay in a Tupperware for a few days, although they might stick together a bit if they're still moist when you throw them in.

If you are ready to cook the tortellini, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, and drop them in. They will cook very, very quickly—in a matter of one or two minutes, three tops. Watch them carefully, tasting every thirty seconds or so for consistency, and when you have the pasta where you like it turn off the heat and strain them through a colander. Serve hot, tossed with just a smidgen of olive oil or butter so they don't stick and, if you like, a dusting of Parmesan cheese.

Something solid and normal

I have been trying not to tell you anything about the wedding this week. I have been trying to put it on a shelf, to sit down squarely, and to write you about something solid and normal, like butternut squash or apple pie or turkey soup. I have daydreamed stories about scalloped potatoes and cranberry crisp and basil-tomato-mozzarella sandwiches, but the trouble is, I haven't been making any of those things. I have been planning and thinking about and going over the wedding again and again—with my mother, with Alex, and with his mother, too.

This weekend was especially taken up by It That Shall Not Be Named. Alex and I went up to Wellesley, where he grew up, for a shower thrown by his mother's friend. My mother came down and my sister and her boyfriend, too, and we got all gussied up in black dresses and blue button downs and orange ties and brown boots and ate a whole heap of good food, including quite a few of Judy Harrington's famous grape jelly meatballs. (It sounds strange, I know, but I swear you have never tasted anything like those things.) And after the wine and the high heels and the hugs and the trash bags of wrapping paper, when all was said and done, we drove home with a ridiculous pile of loot.

We felt sort of like bank robbers on the car ride home, worried about getting out for a sandwich or a bottle of fizzy water or a pit stop lest we return to a rubble of missing dinner plates and broken glass, but we made it back unscathed. And when we did, we realized that no one had warned us about the next part. We realized that we had a rather full house and some very important decisions to make over the next few months about what stays and what goes, and then we took a vote about what to do. My vote was to unpack the car into the guestroom, to pile up the boxes and shut the door and lock it and throw away the key and come back after the whole wedding hoopla is over and do the opening all over again (it would be like Christmas! twice!), but Alex informed me that this was not how things would go. We would unpack the car now, and we would unpack it for real. Meaning that there would be all sorts of unpleasant things involved like cleaning out closets, going through clothes, and throwing backpacks from elementary school away. It seemed like a good way to make a mess of an otherwise perfectly wonderful weekend, but the man was determined.

Luckily for everyone's sanity, we unpacked the dinner plates first. They are Gien, from France, and they make plain, un-buttered toast look like a meal for Cherie Blair. I pulled out a batch a pesto from the freezer, and we made a pot of pasta before the big clean. There were still spiders in the entryway closet and packing peanuts all over the floor, but the plates—our first meal on our very own handpicked china—made it all much more okay. In fact, it made it rather splendid.

I have a feeling that from now on, between the wedding and the husband and the perfectly creamy plates, dinner will make me feel that way every single day.

BASIL PESTO

This pesto, adapted from The New Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen, is the one I grew up with, and is one of my all-time favorite sauces. My mother used to make huge batches in the summer to freeze so that we could have homemade pesto all winter long. As a toddler, my sister was famous for finishing her pesto, then promptly placing her oily, green-flecked bowl on her head. She was also famous for going on strike from bathing, but luckily, the two phases didn't overlap much.

3 cups fresh basil leaves, packed
3 large cloves garlic
1/3 cup pine nuts
1/3 cup olive oil
1/3 cup grated parmesan
salt and pepper to taste

Combine everything in a food processor and give it a whirl. Keep going until the pesto is thick and well-blended. Season with salt and pepper to taste.