We’ve long ago outgrown the desire to go out and live it up on New Years Eve. In the last few years we’ve made a tradition of settling in for a special meal, with special food and wine.
This is getting somewhat more and more challenging. We eat “special” meals all the time - we enjoy cooking and we prepare the nice meals that we like routinely. And with the holidays not too far off in the rear view mirror, we were all “hunk O’ beefed” out.
So after much discussion, we decided to make a more elaborate pasta dish. We like pasta and have it often enough, but we typically toss together a quick pasta dish that is brimming with fresh veggies and is basically very healthy.
We’d have none of that healthy stuff for this New Years Eve! So I thought about what sort of pasta dish would be tempting, and I decided I’d throw together a dish that combined all of our favorite pasta flavors. I’m calling it Stuffed Shells with Three Sauces.
It turned out very, very well.
I started with a nice mix of Italian Sausage from our local Italian deli, Fraboni’s. Fraboni’s is great, and I gladly spend a lot of money there! This was a mix of their bulk sausage - half mild, half spicy.
After browning the sausage with onion and garlic, and allowing it to cool, I mixed it with ricotta cheese, parmesan cheese, chopped spinach and an egg.
As the sausage was cooling, I went to work on the alfredo sauce. This was simple to make. I started with a simple roux, then added milk, some real cream, and lots of parmesan/romano grated cheese. I typically don’t salt the alfredo sauce, as the parmesan cheese can tend to be salt on it’s own. A touch of garlic and nutmeg, and the sauce was set aside for future use.
I had also boiled some pasta shells, then rinsed them with cold water to stop “stickage”. I had toyed with the idea of using manicotti shells when I first started putting this recipe together in my mind, but I had flashbacks to unfortunate stuffing incidents of times past, and decided Shells were much easier to work with.
And so I went to work on the assembly line. I lined the bottom of the baking dish with a simple, prepared tomato sauce. The shells stuffed quickly and easily, making me quite happy that I had chosen to use them.
Once all the shells were stuffed, it was time to finish assembling the dish. The alfredo sauce came first, ladled over the shells til they were covered nicely. Then a pesto sauce, made from homemade pesto that had been thinned down with chicken stock was drizzled over that. Finished off with a drizzle of the tomato sauce, the dish was looking quite colorful.
Then it was time to relax with an appetizer of imported proscuitto and aged asiago cheese shavings, served on a thinly sliced baguette dabbed with mustard. A Bogle Petite Sirah finished off the first course as the pasta baked in the oven.
The pasta was pulled from the oven bubbly, and was allowed to rest before being served with a Ridge Onyx red wine along side.
After the meal we gave the food some time to settle, and then we decided we were too full for the cannoli that we had earmarked for dessert. Instead we finished the evening off with Thomas Hardy’s Vintage Ale. Port is our usually our New Years Eve tradition, but when we moved out of our house last month we were reminded that we had some of this vintage ale stored away in our wine cellar. This vintage was 1994, and it had gotten even more smooth and chocolately over the years it had been resting away.
And with that - on to the new year. This year I’ll be focusing on more healthy cooking. I’ve gotten away from that in 2004, and I can tell. It’s time to get back into the swing of things and begin to pay attention again - because you really can prepare great food that is still very healthy. (And that doesn’t mean Alfredo sauce… at least not the way I made it this night!)
Happy New Year everyone.
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