Tonight we made pasta all’Amatriciana and an arugula salad with roasted root vegetables with a dijon mustard-maple syrup-sherry vinaigrette. We made the pasta because we wanted to make a simple pasta that was a little different from our usual tomato sauce. This one is different because you start by sauteeing pancetta (thick bacon), and then add onions, before adding tomatoes. It has a deeper (almost sweeter) taste than just tomato sauce. (Special thanks to Mark Bittman’s Quick and Easy Recipes for the recipe.) We chose the root vegetable salad because we wanted to take advantage of the fall vegetables, plus we could make extra oven-roasted french fries for us at the same time. The salad was good but we all decided it would have been better with a little goat cheese (wouldn’t everything?).
For dessert we decided to try to make apple roses based on a video we saw on TV. Ours weren’t we quite as pretty as the ones on the video, but they still tasted terrific, especially when we added fresh whipped cream. We also got to experiment with puff pastry (we didn’t make it; we bought it frozen and then let it thaw). Puff pastry is fun to work with if you don’t have to make it from scratch.
The full dinner (except for the apple roses:)
Arugula salad with root vegetable fries and pepitas.
Side of home- made roasted fries
Apple roses…baked!
Roasted sweet potato, yukon gold potato and parsnip fries
Pasta all’Amatriciana
The steps of making apple roses:
1. Slice apples for apple roses
2.Squeeze lemon juice for apple slices to soak in (with a bowl of water)
3. Roll puff pastry out before cutting into six strips
Layer apple slices on puff pastry, fold bottom layer of pastry over bottom of apples, sprinkle with cinnamon, roll up
Bake rolled up apple roses at 375 for 35 minutes.
