Simple Italian Food - Pasta with Onions · Jun 9, 09:09 AM by James Martin
If you live in Italy long enough, you get to know darned well what makes the food distinctive. You use as few ingredients as you can get away with and still have something on the plate. You depend on the freshness and flavor of those ingredients to make the dish tasty. You eat it with a decent wine. You eat it outdoors if the weather is fine.
Today Martha made a recipe we first learned about in Sardinia. How many ingredients? Well, you have some spaghetti (ours was ala chitarra), olive oil, grating cheese and onions.
You simply cook the onions (in this case the reliable Tropea onions we get at the store plus one of indeterminate heritage our neighbor gave us) for a long time in a little olive oil. Martha cooked them half an hour. Don’t let them brown much if you can help it, just let them get limp and flavor the oil. Cook the pasta, then combine everything. Dust with the cheese. Serve.
How hard was that?
Tonight we’re having salt baked fish. Rinse a whole, gutted fish in water, put it in a pile of salt—letting its tail stick out, cook for 400 degrees F or 200 C for 25 minutes or so. It’s primitive. It’s delicious.
Or we might grill it, if the winds don’t kick up. Primitive, too.
(I’m going to miss my fish guy and his little truck. I head to California in two weeks. Dead fish pieces hacked by an idiot and trapped for an indeterminate time in Styrofoam trays. Yuck.)
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