Stay at Stove Dad

Basil, the Hard Way; and a Raita recipe

Having just finished a major work deadline, I've been recuperating by taking it easy. Summer is in full swing here, mentally, emotionally, and seasonally. But life still is fraught with little challenges. This afternoon, an old lady at the Park Slope Food Coop called me a "prick." I didn't feel like that was very cooperative of her.

Before I was insulted by my fellow coop member, I was juggling shopping lists--I wanted to buy things for my upcoming beach vacation (organic meats and the like); things for the friends I'm having for brunch tomorrow; and stuff for the week--and I was getting distracted. Did I want to make poached salmon? Or would frittatas be better? I've settled on the latter, especially because I couldn't find any dill for the sauce to go with the fish.

For dinner tonight, I was planning on having a bit of commercial, pre-made Indian food. Santa Maria has become fond of Maya Kaimal's fresh simmer sauce (her favorite: the tamarind curry). I think the sauce is okay: the thing I like most about it is its convenience. There's nothing more to do than open the jar and heat it. The sauce benefits greatly from the addition of a fresh raita, so I looked for basil to make some.

The coop almost always has basil. They display it in a wooden box, with a hinged top. I opened it, and looked in. There was nothing there but a morass of wilting and darkening bunches of greenhouse basil from New Jersey. I decided to pass. Next to the box, however, there was a little display of local organic basil. It was hard to know if this was any good--the first bunch I picked up was most certainly a head of arugula. The coop is staffed by members, and not all members are created equal when it comes to stocking the shelves.

Below the arugula, though, I found a sprightly little bunch of nice green basil. I grabbed it and threw it in my cart, thinking of a Mark Bittman article I had read recently, in which he talked about the magnificence of summer basil. He was beside himself with its intensity and beauty. I liked the article, but I wasn't really buying his assessment that local summer basil is really all that better than regular basil.

Boy was I wrong! The basil was the best I'd ever tasted. It was sharp and sweet at the same time, and had hints of citrus and other flavors that would make a wine writer reach for his thesaurus. It made my raita super delicious, and it made getting called a prick well worth it.

Quick Summer Raita

• 1/2 cucumber, peeled, seeded, and chopped thinly, or grated, roughly
• 1 cup non fat yogurt
• 1 fistful of basil, chopped
• 1 Tablespoon fresh lime juice
• Sea salt and pepper to taste

Combine ingredients and enjoy (Note Santa Maria prefers this with cilantro, and adds that it can be made richer by using full fat yogurt and by adding a bit of olive oil).

Grilling Made Easy and Healthy (though not as easy as having someone else do it)

As a man, I feel like I'm supposed to like barbecuing, but the truth is that I don't. Every few months, however, I forget this. Thoughts of fire and smoke and meat incite some kind of atavistic urge, and I'll find myself standing over hot coals. My amnesia usually coincides with a major holiday, such as Memorial Day, which is the last time that I did some grilling. 

Because it is now high grilling season (see Mark Bittman's article in today's New York Times on "101 Fast Recipes for Grilling"), I'll share a bit of what I learned that day, and since.

I was at my mother's house and she suggested that we have a few of the aunts and uncles over for a start-of-summer barbecue. I was game to cook. Talk turned from chicken to burgers to steak. I pressed for the latter, and headed to the butcher. At the the market, I relied on the clerk to suggest a cut, as I know next to nothing about steak. I didn't want to spend a whole lot, and he suggested skirt steak. "Four minutes a side" he said.

The other thing that I didn't know that day is that grilling can be carcinogenic. A little piece in the Times a few days later, on May 27, by Anahad O'Connor, set me straight. Apparently, the high temperatures that are so prized, "create toxins called heterocyclic amines, which have been linked to some cancers. Marinating lowers the risk by preventing the formation of the toxins." Especially effective is rosemary. The article gives a couple of suggested marinades that sound both tasty and healthy.

I didn't know about the benefits of marinating when I was cooking the skirt steak. The clerk ended up being wrong about the timing, but I liked the cut anyway. It wasn't just the taste that appealed to me, it was the speed with which it cooks. I'd say it only needs two minutes a side. As far as I'm concerned, the less time at the grill, the better.

Quick Asian Influenced Pork and Rice and Asparagus Salad Recipe

“Never complain, never explain,” said Sir Francis Bacon. Or maybe it was Benjamin Disraeli. Or maybe Henry Ford II. No matter who said the phrase, it’s hardly any use around here. Has anyone ever met a New Yorker who doesn’t complain?

I’m not going to start doing so now, but I will shed a little light on my absence from this space. Where to start? I’m being evicted; I’m looking for a new home; and I’m facing incredible work deadlines. But I’m not complaining.

These things take up my time and mental energy. I now know more than I ever thought I would about the rights of tenants (reassuring); the number of termite-sniffing dogs in the metro area (long story, real-estate related, for another time); and just how much caffeine is required to work all day and all night (try three Lipton tea bags, per cup, per hour).

The other night I experienced a nice personal breakthrough while cooking. All my life I’ve been very adept at following recipes (though I never seem to be able to memorize them and I am always going back to the cookbook, or Internet, no matter how many times I’ve made a given dish), but I’ve learned that to really cook is to make do with what’s on hand, to improvise from a given set of ingredients. I’ve always wanted this ability, but I’ve made a habit of shopping carefully and cooked accordingly.

That's a bit harder these days, and Monday night we were coming home from work with the kids in tow. Nothing was planned for dinner. I had pork loin, leftover rice, and fresh asparagus, which makes a nice warm salad, provided one has basil. But we didn’t have any of the herb. Santa Maria suggested substituting spinach for the basil, but I knew better.

Recently, I was thinking about fried rice. I like to start it with garlic and ginger, and the last time I prepared it, I thought it would be nice to stop there. So that’s what I did with the rice. I roasted the pork loin and steamed the asparagus.  I chopped the meat and the vegetable and I had a nice new variation on the salad.

All it needed was a decent dressing. That was a bit harder to come by, and I settled on white-wine vinegar and olive oil. Santa Maria added cayenne pepper to hers. Next time I’ll consider mixing in lime juice and, maybe, some rice vinegar or other Asian influence. Then I’ll really be cooking.

Quick Asian Influenced Pork and Rice and Asparagus Salad

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 teaspoon mustard
• 1 teaspoon garam masala
• 1 pork loin
• 1 bunch asparagus
• 1 cup rice
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• One 1-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and minced

Cook the rice.

Mix the olive oil, mustard, and garam masala and spread over the pork loin. Salt and pepper the meat, and roast under the broiler for about ten minutes a side, until the internal temperature tops 145 degrees.

Clean and steam the asparagus.

Saute the garlic and ginger in a large frying pan, until soft and then add the rice and keep stirring.

Chop the meat and the asparagus and add to the rice.

Dress with olive oil and white wine vinegar.

Amatriciana Sauce Recipe Follow Up

Yesterday, I introduced Pinta to the leftover amatriciana sauce from the evening before. I was getting her dinner together, and she was sitting on a chair in the kitchen. She was clamoring for pasta putanesca, and I wasn't in the mood to make it (I was busy stirring a pot of shrimp-fennel risotto). I told her that I had a sauce with bacon in it. She loves bacon, so she was instantly interested.  Because she doesn't like the look and feel of chopped onions, I pureed the sauce with an immersion blender. It was quite thick, so I added a bit of red wine to thin it out. Pinta loved it, but after she tasted the bit on the end of my finger she had a question for me, "Is that spicy, daddy?" Well, yes it was. I forgot to take out the chili pepper before blending it.

If I were to make this again for myself, I would leave the pepper in. If I were to make it for the kids, I'd take it out. And if I were to make it again for Santa Maria, I would drain the bacon fat before proceeding with the rest of the recipe. How would you make it? I'm curious to hear.

Mad Rush Variation on Amatriciana Sauce Recipe

Things have been very stressful at home lately, with the real-estate search in full swing and a massive work deadline hanging over my head. I've never been busier before in my life. Blogging is one thing that's fallen to the wayside. Another is cooking itself. Earlier this week, we ordered take-out. The other night I had frozen empanadas. Last night though, I was sick of crap food. I was tired. It was late. Santa Maria was exhausted, having driven through the blizzard to return to NYC from a speaking commitment outside Philadelphia. Nonetheless, I had a deep desire for something tasty. My thoughts turned to amatriciana sauce.

Years ago, Santa Maria introduced me to a variation on this savory sauce. She first had the sauce on the very first day of a visit to her delightful friend Carla, in Rome, in 1989. Carla is a Scottish-Roman beauty who is now cooking up a storm in Bruxelles, and sometimes in Tuscany. Santa Maria made it with rosemary and pancetta, and I loved it. Those were more simple times. We didn't have kids, and I didn't know that "for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale — cured, unsmoked pig jowl." Or that "it's impossible to say 'all'amatriciana' without thinking of 'bucatini,' a thick hollow spaghetti."

These days I don't have any @#$!% time for such frivolity. Last night, I was hungry, and when I'm hungry I'm not good company. Things were tense at home, and I wasn't making them any less tense. I couldn't find a recipe for the sauce in the index of any of my cookbooks. Never mind securing guanciale or bucatini, I couldn't spell "Amatriciana." I thought it started with an "M." Finally, I figured it out, and found a recipe for it in Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking."

It called for pancetta, which I didn't have, but I knew there was bacon in the fridge and that that would work just fine. It didn't mention rosemary, but that didn't deter me. The dried herb is a bit tricky to work with. Santa maria doesn't like the way it can feel like pine needles on the tongue, so I tried chopping up the stalks. It helped a bit, though she wasn't really in the mood for the sauce in the end. I liked it, and I was glad I went to the little effort required to make it. It made my night much better.

Blink of an Eye Pasta Alla'Amatricina Sauce

• 1 onion, peeled and diced
• 1 chili pepper
• 3 slices of bacon, chopped
• One 28oz can of peeled plum tomatoes, pureed with an immersion blender or chopped by hand.
• Olive oil
• 1 teaspoon dried rosemary, diced
• Parmigian0-Reggiano or pecorino cheese, grated

Heat the olive oil in a sauce pot.

Add the chili pepper.

Add the onion and saute until translucent.

Add the bacon and continue to cook for a few minutes longer.

Add the tomatoes and the rosemary and simmer for about twenty-five minutes.

Serve over pasta of your choice with the grated cheese.

Spicy Tomato Sauce with Shrimp and Mint

When Pinta was an infant, I did most of my cooking very early in the day. She used to wake before five, and not go back to sleep. Ever. She's a free-spirited, independent-minded soul and there was no changing her mind. I would put her on the floor beside me in the kitchen and start chopping vegetables in the pre-dawn hours. Standing over the cutting board I finally understood the U.S Army advertising slogan of my youth. Their television ads used to trumpet the fact that "We do more before six a.m. than most people do in a day." That's because they were doing stuff at night. It was dark when I was cooking. And those were dark days for me, too. I walked around in a tunnel-vision state of sleep deprivation. I'm still amazed that I was able to hang onto my job and remain married. It was tough. 

Pinta has since grown up and now, with a random waking every now and again, generally sleeps until about seven. This morning they stayed in bed until seven thirty. The other day, they didn't even get out of bed until eight-thirty. I know that the grown-up thing to do would be to set my alarm clock and get on with my day at a respectable hour, but I can't just yet. I'm enjoying sleeping late too much.

As a consequence, I've had to find a new time to do my cooking. I switched to cooking the day before, whipping up soups and stews and sauces after doing the evening dishes. I'm always thinking a meal or two ahead, so it seemed perfectly natural for me to finish one meal and then start cooking the next one. This worked well until our recent real-estate travails. Nothing like a "Notice of Termination" to change one's schedule a bit. Now, at night I spend the hours before bedtime scouring the internet looking for a new place to live.

Not all of my time searching for a new place is spent at a computer keyboard. Some of it is spent trekking around the city looking at places. Last weekend we were in Hudson Heights. This past Wednesday, in the midst of a blizzard, we were dragging the kids behind us on sleds to look at a floor-through in the neighborhood. It was in a perfect location, and it was close to a perfect apartment. The only thing missing was about three hundred square feet. If we were completely different people with about a third as many possessions, we'd be perfectly comfortable there. Alas, the search goes on.

Ever since I first moved to Park Slope, I've loved the neighborhood. I'm not the only one, though, and a lot of other people have come to know its charms. They've moved here in droves, and the price of an apartment has shot through the roof. Prices have come down a bit over the last year, but they're still stratospheric. It's unlikely that we'll be able to find a space with enough room for what we have to spend. So, we're looking all over the city. And every time I consider moving away, I think first of what I'll lose--easy access to high-quality organic food.

The day before the snowstorm, I came home from work intent on making a shrimp, garlic, and mint pasta sauce that has long been a favorite of ours. The recipe comes from Mark Bittman, and he calls it Roman Shrimp. It requires fresh mint, which I happened to have in the house. I didn't want the mint to go bad, so I decided to make the sauce. For some reason, I didn't have any frozen shrimp in the freezer, and I had to buy some. It was very easy for me to do so because we live almost right across the street from the Park Slope Food Coop. As it happened, the coop was jam packed with panicked pre-storm shoppers and there had been a run on the frozen shrimp. There was none for sale. Just down the block, though, there's a fancy store called Union Market, and I knew I could get shrimp there. I popped in for a pound and was home before seven.

The convenient location is the best thing going for my present apartment, and the most attractive thing about finding another place in the neighborhood. I was talking about this to my therapist, and he thought I was crazy. At that moment, I was still seriously considering the shoe-box floor through. He didn't think it would be wise to squeeze my children into a room that's five by seven (no joke) just because it would be easy to buy shrimp. What does he know?

Spicy Tomato Sauce with Shrimp with Garlic and Fresh Mint a.k.a. Roman Shrimp

• 1 chili pepper
• 6 cloves garlic, peeled and cut in half and then sliced
• 1 28-oz. can peeled plum tomatoes, diced
• 1/2 to 1 lb. peeled medium shrimp, sliced lengthwise into two pieces
  
• 1/2 cup or more of fresh mint, chopped
• Spaghetti or other pasta of choice.

Put a large pot of salted water on to boil for the pasta.

In a large sauce pot, heat olive oil and then add the garlic and the chili pepper. Cook the garlic until it is brown. This gives the sauce an intense, dark note. 

Add the tomatoes and reduce.

Start to cook the pasta.

When the pasta is cooked, stir the shrimp into the tomato sauce.

Cook the sauce until the shrimp curl into spirals and are cooked through.

Add the mint to the sauce and serve.

Enjoy.

Super Bowl Sunday Pork Shoulder Recipe

We've now gone from simply obsessing over our impending move to doing something about it. We spent the morning and the afternoon driving all over Manhattan and Brooklyn and making the acquaintance of a number of real estate brokers. I spent a lot of time in various kitchens, but I didn't do any cooking. The move is becoming all consuming. While watching the Super Bowl at my brother's place, a nice 1,000 square foot, pre-war Elevator 2 BR, 1 Bath apartment (it's hard now not to think entirely in real-estate terms), I enjoyed a delicious pork roast that he cooked up. I think this is the recipe he used. I've used it many times before and can vouch for it. It works just as well in an oven. I don't have time to write it out, but the recipe can be found here.

Super Simple Tomato Sauce Recipe for Fresh Pasta

Cooking for a family often feels like running on a treadmill--keep moving, or fall off. I would like nothing more than to get out of the kitchen and spend all my energy solving our housing crisis (we're facing eviction), but I can't. We still have to eat.

The truth is, we are in a crazy limbo right now. Even though we will be moving out of the apartment in the near future, at the moment there's a great peace. It is relaxing to know one's fate, and to enjoy the absence of insane neighbors down below, screaming every time our kids run down the hallway. It's okay now, go ahead jump and thump to your heart's content.

Towards the end of December, I had my last last verbal interactions with the now ex-neighbors. It was a weeknight, about 7:45 when they called on the phone. The man was upset, for the umteenth-time, about the noise the kids were making. He accused me of being disrespectful because he said that we knew that he was moving out. That was a shocker. Did he have any idea how much time I spent chasing after the kids and telling them to quiet down? Did he have any idea about the anxiety their every footfall created? The man became more and more accusatory on the phone. "You won," he said. "We're moving out and you get to stay."  After he got of the phone, I sat down and thought about his call. I suddenly realized what day it was. It was the final day of December. He was calling to complain about the noise of two little kids playing at 8 pm on New Year's Eve!

They are gone, now, so there are no more phone calls. And while we plot our next move, I have time to spare in the kitchen. They say that behind every great man, there's a woman. I don't know about that, but, in my case, behind every great dinner, there's a woman (and two girls). Yesterday, Santa Maria proposed that we make fresh ravioli with pork, porcini, and parmesan stuffing. I was game. It is one of my old favorite dishes.

We've made fresh pasta three or four times before. The first time was years ago, before we had kids. It was one of the most revelatory cooking experiences I've ever had. Nothing I'd ever made tasted as wildly different than what I expected and as uniquely delicious as fresh pasta. That first time was remarkable. 

We still haven't quite mastered the technique of rolling out the dough and cutting the pasta, though Santa Maria might have a different opinion. She's the one who, with her baking experience, tends to take care of this task. Our guidebook in to the country of fresh pasta is Mark Bittman's ever-useful "How to Cook Everything." He gives tips and techniques about making the dough (it's easy, but not as easy as he makes it out to be), and basically it comes down to mixing flour, eggs, salt, and a bit of water into an easy to work dough. 

Santa Maria makes the ravioli after I take care of the stuffing. It is a mix of ground pork, garlic, red wine, and chopped porcini. I'm not completely content with the way the ravioli turned out. They were mighty delicious, but I want to refine the recipe and method a bit more before share how to cook them.

Before cooking last night, I took a look through Marcella Hazan's "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking." She goes into a bit more detail than Bittman, and soon, perhaps as soon as we find that future apartment with an open kitchen and acres of counter space, I'll try some of the things she recommends. First order of business: finding "a good lumber-supply house" to cut a pasta rolling pin from a hardwood dowel. Make that the second order of business. The first one will be getting a pasta rolling machine. That will simplify my life.

I did learn something exceedingly useful from reading Hazan, and that is how to make a simple and delicious marinara sauce for the ravioli. I used to make a sauce with butter, canned tomatoes, and a diced onion. My kids have that typical fear of onions, though: they don't like to see them in their food. They don't dislike the taste. I know, because I watched Nina recently devour a hot, buttered bialy (just picture the confused look on her face when I told her it was full of onions.)

I was contemplating a way to make the sauce so they would eat it (i.e. with no onions visible), when I came across Hazan's recipe. It is genius. She calls for the same ingredients--tomatoes, onions, and butter--but she simply says to cut the onion in half and let it simmer in the sauce for forty-five minutes. Amazing. It has much the same flavor as the one I'd made previously, and, miraculously, no onions were visible. I adjusted the ratio of butter to tomato a bit, and I increased the size of the recipe. She calls for five tablespoons of butter to one can of tomatoes. You can make it that way if you prefer. My recipe is a bit lower in fat, but still mouthwatering. She says of hers, "This is the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer, more irresistibly sweet tomato taste. I have known people to skip the pasta and eat the sauce directly out of the pot with a spoon."

We enjoyed making the meal so much that, in spite of the stressful times, we spent a deliriously happy evening in our tiny kitchen. We were so enthralled in the mixing, kneading, and simmering that we couldn't make it the ten feet to our dining room. Santa Maria was rolling out the ravioli. I was dipping them in the boiling water and fishing them out moments later. All four of us were elbow to elbow, scarfing down fresh pasta and that wonderful sauce. I didn't have a place to sit. I kept saying that it felt like we were eating on a train, at rush hour. It was a real joy.

Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter

• Two 28 ounce cans of peeled tomatoes, diced (I use an immersion blender)
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 large onion, peeled and cut in half

Place the onion in a large sauce pot with the tomatoes and the butter. Simmer for forty-five minutes. Salt to taste.

Note: I added fresh basil at the end. It's a nice touch, if that's what you're looking for. Also, this recipe is for a large serving for four or more hungry eaters. I had a pint left over and I froze it. 

How to Cook an Egg

I've found it hard to cook these days for a couple of reasons. The first is that finding a new place to live is a massive task. Instead of chopping onions, I'm talking on the phone with friends about real-estate lawyers and the ins-and-outs of other neighborhoods. We need to move someplace with decent subway access to Manhattan, proximity to a great grocery store (nothing we find will land us as close to the Park Slope Food Coop as we currently are, alas), and good public schools. The first two points are not as much of an issue as the latter one. A good school will most likely determine where we end up next. Figuring out what makes a school good, is another question. Answering that will require more time on the phone and in front of the computer.

The other reason is a bit more ironic. It's really quite a shame that our over-sensitive ex-neighbors moved out when they did. One of the things that drove them crazy was the sound of the kids in the early morning. When they came to complain about it, I told them that I sympathized completely--the sound of the kids in the early morning drove me crazy.

The kids slept until 8:30 this morning. The later they sleep, the less time I have to cook before going to work. Back when Pinta used to wake at 5 a. m., I would make soups and stews with her beside me on the floor of the kitchen. I think I dirtied every non-lethal utensil daily during those days. I would toss her pots, pans, spoons, empty plastic containers, and anything I could get my hands on to keep her busy. I got a lot of cooking done back then.

But this morning the house was silent until 8:30 a.m. I was shocked when I woke. We had a mad dash to get out to school and work. I didn't have time to do any prep work in the kitchen for tonight's dinner. When I got home from work, I was tired and hungry. Fortunately, I had made chicken soup over the weekend, and I ate some of that for dinner. We have a freezer full of old bread, and I used three pieces to make grilled cheese. Still, I wasn't satisfied. I needed more protein. The best thing I could find in the fridge to eat were eggs.

When I was a child, my mother made eggs a special way for me. She called it a "Chopped Up Egg." It caused great confusion whenever I slept over at a friend's house. "Eggs for breakfast? Over easy, sunny side up, or scrambled?," the parent would ask me. "Chopped up, please," I would reply, not knowing anything else to ask for. "What?" was usually the response.

It is a poached egg in a dish, chopped and served with some butter and salt and pepper. My mother usually served it in a tea cup. I loved it. I don't make it very often anymore, but it still tastes good in my memory. I was too lazy to make chopped up eggs this evening. I just boiled and peeled the eggs and ate them. I'm not proud, but I am well rested.

Chopped Up Egg

• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon butter
• salt and pepper

Bring a pot of water to a boil and then reduce the flame until the water is barely simmering.

Crack the egg and slip it into the water gently.

Poach it for three or four minutes, depending on how well done you like your eggs. I like the yolk bright yellow and solid, but you may not.

Put the butter into the bottom of a teacup, along with some salt and pepper.

When the egg is ready, remove it from the water and pat it dry with a paper towel.

Transfer it to the teacup and chop the egg up with a spoon, mixing the butter and the salt and pepper together.

Enjoy.

Note: This is also delicious with a bit of toast crumbled into the cup.

The End of an Era, and a Zucchini and Mint Pasta Recipe

The ability to handle change is a skill that I want to instill in my children. The best way to teach something, of course, is by example. Unfortunately, I'm about as good at being adaptable as an elephant might be at riding a bicycle. Change is not something that comes easily to me. It took me decades to get into therapy (representing more of a cause than a symptom, perhaps), and I've lived in the same apartment for fifteen years. That is about to end.

I like my apartment, despite its four flights of stairs, its crazy lack of heat in the middle of the night, and its ugly-as-sin kitchen cabinets. All of its flaws have always been redeemed by two key facts--its price, which has been below market for years, and its location, which in real-estate parlance is all that matters, matters, matters.

The cracked bathroom tiles and the odd placement of the refrigerator (it's actually in the hall) are not driving me from my nest. My landlords are. I've never had a lease, and on Friday I received a notice of termination. We've been given thirty days to get out. The low-rent bohemian dream is over. It is time to wake up to the realities of the current real-estate market. 

I'm confident that we'll manage the transition to a new place just fine. For the past few days, though, it's been rough going. I'm shocked, of course, to be served a notice from a lawyer. During those fifteen years, I was never once late with the rent, and I kept an eye on the building when the landlords, who live on the second floor, weren't around. How many times have I shoveled the snow from the sidewalk in front of the building while the owners were off in Florida? Who made sure that the building's garbage cans didn't blow down the street on a windy day? Who didn't chop vegetables on the kitchen counter, lest the knife mar the Formica? I treated this place like it was my own.

I'll get around to telling the story of how we ended up getting thrown out. It has its funny parts, but as the maxim goes, comedy equals tragedy plus time. I need a little more time to deal with it. The short story: our new downstairs neighbors, who have since moved out, could not tolerate the pitter-patter of little feet. The day they arrived, before even saying hello, they ran upstairs at 6pm to complain about the sound of our kids running around the apartment.  They acted as if we were raising pachyderms, not children. They were implacable. We did our best to keep them--and by extension our landlord--happy. It didn't work. Neville Chamberlain never had it so bad.

Now I have a grand opportunity to demonstrate my own adaptability. Fortunately, there's one arena where I often get to practice the skill: cooking. Take the other night, for example. I had been planning to make a zucchini-pasta recipe from Mark Bittman. The recipe calls for basil. I had purchased the fragrant herb earlier in the week. I washed it right away, which helps it last longer in the refrigerator. Life intervened, though, and I never got around to using it. The leaves turned black and soggy and I had to throw the bunch out.

I never made the dish. The zucchini, on the other hand, held up just fine. So, a week later, when I wanted to cook the dish I had almost all the ingredients. I was out of basil, but I did have mint. Santa Maria had purchased a bunch a few days earlier for a leg of lamb I was making for an erudite friend, and my former roommate, in town from London. We ate the lamb, but not the mint. So, there it was. Would the mint taste as good as the basil in the recipe? I was pretty sure it would. In the end, I think, it was better. Hopefully our housing situation will turn out the same way.

Pasta with Zucchini, Ricotta, and Mint

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 or 4 small zucchini, rinsed and diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup ricotta cheese
• 1/2 to 1 cup fresh mint leaves, washed, dried, and chopped
• Penne or other pasta
• Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, optional

Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt it.

Heat a large frying pan and add the oil.

Sauté the zucchini, stirring occasionally, until it browns and gets tender. Do this in batches if necessary. The important thing for browning is insuring that there's sufficient surface area on the pan for the zucchini.

Start to cook the pasta.

Stir the garlic in with the zucchini.

Warm a serving bowl and put in the ricotta. When the pasta is ready, drain it and reserve the cooking liquid. Use this, a little at a time, to thin the ricotta until it is the consistency of a sauce.

Toss the pasta, zucchini, and mint into the bowl. Add the Parmesan, salt and pepper.

Serve.