Wow!  It's been months since my last installment on my little blog space.  I've let you all down, my loyal followers so let me make up for it with an entry based around PASTA!  I mean, who doesn't like pasta?  I apologize to all my Gluten intolerant friends.  Whether we should eat it or not  it just tastes so darned good.  Is there an "Italian Paradox" out there like the French have?  Could  a good Barolo counteract the effects of the carbs found in a heaping plate of pasta?  Who cares, actually.


To fill you in on the little nug really quickly, Baby K has been doing splendidly.  I inadvertently taught him how to stick out his tongue.  This has become a bit of a habit for him at this point.  He is sleeping through the night, is eating well, is growing out his mullet in a fine fashion, and is just the most pleasant little thing ever.  I am a bit biased though.  Mrs. K is doing equally as well.  Okay enough of that!

So, Mrs. K. and I were hosting some of our dear friends for a birthday celebration.  Now, this couple is the type that are well-traveled, well-read and well-versed in just about anything that involves anything hip and cool.  This encompasses food, as well.  God, they are so much hipper than Mrs. K and Myself.  At least, that's the way I look at these folks.  So, I was under the gun and had no idea what to cook for this birthday feast.  A quick phone call yielded my inspiration.  "Well, he likes pasta," I was informed.  I mean, c'mon, we've already established that everyone loves pasta, so Italian it is!  Thank God, my favorite cuisine to prepare of all time.

A little history for starters.  For some reason, France gets all the credit for being the "Food Snobs" of the world.  I mean, yeah, French food is delicious, it's so technical to prepare (this is a good thing), and is so diverse as it is a country that is comprised of shorelines, highlands, lowlands, mountains, borders shared by Spain, Germany and Italy.  But great culinaria was birthed in ITALIA!  Bet you didn't know that.  Something with Caterina De Midici.  You know, she was Italian at one point but became queen of France.  Just like when you or I move to another city we may take a baseball cap emblazened with our hometown baseball team just for "ol' time sake?"  Well, when Signora De Medici moved from Italy to France she took servants, splendors, and of course chefs with her.  This was at a time in France when fine cuisine was non existent.  Therefore, Caterina De Medici in fact brought Haute Cuisine to France and over the centuries, France made it their own.  Now, all you historians out there, please correct me if I am wrong.  But, let's speak privately.


Anyway, back to the food preparations.  Gosh it was so long ago I can hardly remember what I was doing.  Well, anyway, here we go to the best of my memory:

One day, long ago as I was walking around our local Wal-Mart I went through the meat department to see what good ol' Sam Walton had available at a "reasonable price"  When lo and behold I spotted beef cheeks!  This was alongside beef tripe and beef tongue.  (I think Sam was catering to his Latin constituency.)  But anyway.  "No way!"  I apparently exclaimed in my head.  With this in mind I decided to make some beef cheek raviolis.


Bear with me now, this is a multi-step process involving trimming the cheek meat of fat and "silver skin", searing, braising and processing the ultra-tender meat into a coarse meat paste of sorts to be wrapped up into a thin sheet of pasta dough.  Let's look at some pictures, shall we?

Wal Mart beef cheeks, I mean, who would have ever thought?  

These are the cheeks rinsed and patted dry, pre-trimming:

Peeling off that that pesky "silver skin"  I suppose you could leave this on  and pick it out afterwards as you shred the meat and it would add extra richness to the sauce as the collagen breaks down during the slow and low braising process:

 Seasoned with "S and P" (that's kitchen speak for salt and pepper) and a hard sear put on the meat.  I feel that this is very important to a good braise as the caramelization of the meat adds yet another level of depth of flavor to the final product:

Your standard mirepoix.  I know my loyal followers know that a standard mirepoix consists of.... anyone....anyone?  One part carrots, one part celery and two parts onions.

Cheeks removed and mirepoix SLOWLY caramelizing in the same pan.  This is a real cool process in which the liquid in the veggies actually sweat out initially to deglaze the pan the meat caarmelized in and then the sugars in the veggies ever so slowly caramelize as well:

Cheeks added back into the pan and then deglazed again with a nice, big bodied red.  I used a Cali Cabernet instead of a "Super Tuscan" of sorts just because that's what I had on hand:

 Alcohol cooked out of the wine, garlic and various aromatics in and a couple cans of San Marzano tomatoes crushed for the braise.  San Marzano tomatoes have the perfect balance of acid to sugar for a long braise as well as for tomato sauce:

Covered with parchment to keep the liquid intact for the braise and then topped with a lid:

 So, while this braise was gettin' down I start on roasting some butternut squash for another ravioli:

Scoop out the seeds and membranes.  You can actually save the seeds and roast them in some olive oil and S&P just as you would pumpkin seeds and use as a garnish:

Roasted nice and tender after being brushed with some olive oil and seasoned.  Hey, a rogue squash seed! Scoop the flesh out and into a blender:

So, this is the simplest ravioli filling ever.  It consists of roasted squash, buttermilk, a good butter (I prefer Plugra to finish sauces and to use in a non-cooked application such as icings and I guess in butternut squash filling) and of course, salt and white pepper:

One of two fillings done Silky isn't it?:

Cheeks after a long braise.  I stress long braise because this meat is "tough."  It was once considered one of those lesser cuts until some chef made it "cool" again and as an unintended consequence made the price go from scrapple to 3 dollars a pound pre-trimmed.

Braising liquid and aromatics being strained to become the sauce:

"Smashing" the cheeks into a paste.  Now, cheek meat has a very unique consistency.  It is a skeletal muscle, meaning muscles that contract voluntarily (as in when a cow is chewing its cud) but because of the location of the muscle and being such a compact group, the striations of muscle fibre are very short making it possible to shred the meat into a very fine paste.

I added some of the braising liquid to improve the consistency and as this cools the collagens within will tighten up and become even stronger as a binder as will the flavors:

You can see how short the muscle fibres actually are.  Compare that to a pulled pork shoulder.  Pork butt has muscle fibres up to 2-3 inches long.  We are looking a 5mm in length for the beef cheeks:

Okay, two fillings down, into the fridge they go to be used the following day.  As with any braised meat, the flavors really develop as you cool them and then reheat them.


Next up, a butter poached lobster for a broccoli rabe, cannellini bean and citrus salad.  I boil and shock a fresh lobster first so that I can pick the meat out of it.  This is a quick process as I want to do the butter poaching a la minute later:

After extracting every last morsel of lobster meat, I blend the lobster carcass and "tamale" with some extra virgin olive oil in a blender and strain to extract an intensely lobster flavored oil for garnish:

Time to make the pasta.  Look up a pasta recipe on line.  They are out there.  So, it's just so simple.  I mean, flour, egg, water and salt.  Pretty simple in my book. Let it rest after mixing at room temp for a while.  This is pretty important or else you will be fighting the incredible shrinking pasta:

  Roll it out to the lowest setting on your pasta machine:

Make sheets and fill 'er up.

You can see how thin this pasta is.  Remember, you are doubling up the pasta as you put the top sheet on the bottom sheet:

Be sure to get all the air out as you seal the pasta and cut them out into whatever shape you like.  I didn't on this round of raviolis and of course, they exploded as they cooked.  I think that a quail yoke would have been awesome in these raviolis.  For next time I suppose:

Lobster salad plated (Clunky plating, I know):

Butternut squash ravioli with saged buerre noisette (that's browned butter)  plated.  (I know, that's so 1990 but darn it, it's good!)  I think that it's a classic:

Beef cheek ravioli with a San Marzano tomato ragout plated:

You can see the pasta is transluscent it's so thin:

Dessert was an Italian buttercream iced birthday cake.  I will spare you the agony of watching me make a "softball' meringue.

As you may have noticed this was by no means a traditional Italian dinner progression of: Antipasti (appetizer), Primi (Pasta course), Secondi (Meat course), and Dolci (dessert).  I skipped Secondi and doubled up on the pasta course.  I was more in the mood for pasta than anything else, I didn't feel like roasting a meat,  it's my kitchen, and that's what I prepared!

To sum it all up, pasta is such a wonderful starch, as we all know.  So, treat yourself and forgo the dried stuff and make up a batch for yourself.  If you don't have a pasta machine, who cares?  Use a rolling pin and roll out the pasta "old skool" style and either cut them into into your desired shape or even tear them up into random "rags".  It doesn't matter.  Toss the cooked pasta in something as simple as butter, garlic and salt or make some filled pastas like raviolis.  It's so simple.  I have faith that you can do it! 

BUON APPETITO!