Tomato Sauce in America

It was not your average tomato sauce.

Tomato sauce in America is generally ground up tomatos with herbs of some sort. It's a paste. But instead of putting that on pappardelle I chopped up tomatoes, oragano, garlic, and parsley, mixed it all together with olive oil, salt and pepper and called it tomato sauce.

The sauce was poured on  homemade pappardelle, which is strips of flat pasta about an inch wide.

When you look at the ingredients, pasta looks simple. Eggs, flour and salt. How hard could it be? Pasta is so devious.

So you mound of flour on a cutting board, make a well in it and pour in the eggs. Except there's too much egg to fit in the well. So it spills all over your cutting board and you have to keep it from dripping on the floor, while trying to knead it and yelling "No! No! Stay there! Ahhh!!!!" at the same time.

It needs to be kneaded for 10 minutes by hand, then it must rest for an hour and a half, before being rolled so much it is see-through and formed into shapes. But it is delicious.

The Dessert that Turned into Breakfast and Back Again.

Galette. What a lovely word. What a lovely thing. We had bunches of plums so I decided to make plum galette.

Now that I have a food processor again, pastry is easy. Pate brisee, is butter dough, or pie dough, not to be confused with pate sucree, sugar dough, or pate choux, cabbage dough, (which, fortunately, does not have cabbage in it.)

I rolled the pate brisee out to the size of a pizza. I covered it with plums mixed with sugar and such things and then folded the edges of the crust over the filling. The galette was brushed with egg glaze and sprinkled with sugar.

It seemed to get bigger in the oven. I'm not sure if that's actually possible. It was going to be eaten for dessert after dinner, then for breakfast, then when I decided to blog I realized I hadn't actually eaten any. So I did and it was soooooooo good. Sweet, tart and flaky. And quite simple too.