Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Linguine alle (canned) vongole

This was a quick pasta dish I made the other day out of random pantry goods I found buried in the back of my cupboard. Basically I just started off by heating some crushed garlic, chopped anchovies, and red pepper flakes in a pan. I then deglazed with some crappy Chilean chardonnay. After the wine reduced, I tossed in a small can of chopped clams with the liquid. I waited for the liquid to reduce and tossed in the cooked linguine (slightly more than al dente) into the pan with a little bit of pasta water. Tossed the linguine several times in the pan to coat the sauce evenly throughout the pasta, sprinkled some chopped flat leaf parsley (vastly superior to curly parsley), tossed it again, and then plated it. And, it came out much better than i expected. The semolina from the linguine seemed to slough off into the sauce as it cooked in the pan, given the sauce a pleasant, yeasty texture. The clams were ok, but the anchovies helped provide needed brininess; if I were to ever make a sauce with fresh clams, I think adding anchovies would be superfluous. And the herbaceousness of the flat leaf parsley added some lift and brightness to the dish. Not bad for a ghetto pasta dish thrown together in 15 minutes.

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