Marcella’s original version of this sauce is one of the great tomato sauces. She uses canned tomatoes and leaves the onion unchopped then throws everything together to boil into a sauce. It’s wonderful and I encourage you to try it.
This sauce is how I make it when I use fresh tomatoes (although you can use canned for mine as well). The main difference is the onion. I love soft cooked onions and like to have them remain in the sauce.
Pistachio Pesto
Pesto means “paste” and can be made of nearly anything, but I love nut based pestos. For this one the star isn’t a soft herb, like basil or parsley. Instead it’s pure pistachio nuts with a few garlic cloves, some salt and parmesan and enough olive oil to give me the texture I want. Nut pestos can be assertive and the texture quite thick, so it’s important to “lighten” them before tossing with pasta with just a bit of the pasta cooking water. I wait until the pasta is boiling and has given the water the gift of a bit of starch. Then I start adding the cooking water one tablespoon at a time to the pesto until I reach a texture that will just nap the pasta without overwhelming it or any additional ingredients I’m adding.
I was inspired to make this pesto by a bag of the very rare Sicilian Bronte pistachios I bought from Brett Ottolenghi’s Artisanal Foods in Las Vegas.
Don’t skimp on the quality of oil you use. I had a bottle of Cappezzana Oil from the famed Tuscan estate and put it to good use. This is exactly what these high end oils are good for.
I learned how to make fresh pasta in Italy. Nearly every home cook I met used the same proportion, 100 gms of flour to 1 egg so that’s how I make my pasta. Sometimes if I want it really rich I’ll add a couple of extra yolks. I also make it the old fashioned way a la fontana, but for a newbie it’s much easier to simply mix it all together in a bowl.
I love rolling the dough by hand using a super long thin dowel but I also have a double wide manual rolling machine and a home sized electric rolling machine. I recommend buying the Atlas manual pasta machine. You can also use it to make crackers and matzo.