October: Baked Ziti
After last month's successful steak night, I decided I was safe to stick with an Alison Roman recipe and that I deserved to make something a little less stressful. I found her recipe for baked ziti, and I relaxed. Until the day before the dinner party when I decided to read a few of the recipe reviews...there were sooo many. And everyone had a different problem. It was cold in the middle! The sauce was bland! There was too much cheese! Other recipes were better! And then I panicked.
I started reading baked ziti recipes, asking friends, mining my food memory. Everyone had a different suggestion. Eggs, make your own sauce, bake it in tin foil, add sausage, use cottage cheese (?). And to make matters worse, our guests are one month away from their wedding and they're both doing slow carb. On the slow carb diet, you can't eat any carbs or added sugar except for once a week on your cheat day. This was going to be their cheat day dinner — realistically the most important meal of the week. I could not fuck this up.
I also had decided to get experimental with the other major carb element of the meal and use the Samin garlic bread recipe but with pizza dough. So what had once felt like a safe and easy meal was now feeling very risky. I ended up combining several baked ziti recipes and I think I now have what shall be my forever baked ziti recipe, went with my gut to mixed results on the garlic bread pizza (everyone thought it was pesto, but they liked it, so fine) and made my favorite broccoli cooked forever (if you haven't made this, you should really make it — confited broccoli with the most velvety texture, and secret hints of anchovy and hot pepper) and an Italian salad. Due to all the fear, I did also start everyone off with a martini from steak night — definitely didn't hurt :)
CARBS!
And we ended the night with Smitten Kitchen's olive oil chocolate cake. The cake was insane, but I messed up the glaze — it was too thick and sugary. While my guests were much too polite to say anything, I know what Prue and Paul would have said. Lucky for Nick who isn't on slow carb, there is enough left-over cake for breakfasts all week and at least one night of baked ziti for dinner.
Rundown:
Baked Ziti, with this sauce: Quick and Easy Italian American Red Sauce (plus pancetta), plus two eggs and parsley added to the ricotta, cooked this way
Herbed Garlic Bread (but with pizza dough instead of bread)
(Plus marinated mozzarella balls, castelvetrano olives, prosciutto, and soppressata)
