Creating new recipes

Last week, I talked about healthy cooking and even though I liked the Bonnie Stern cook book because there were so many healthy choices, my Canadian cook says I was stretching it a bit to say "we loved it".

So this week, I will tell you how a recipe actually evolves in our kitchen. We usually begin with a standard simple recipe, such as Linguine and Clams that can be found on any catelli box. The recipe is followed with a few tweeks here and there, a little more butter in the form of a beurre manie for instance - just to make sure the sauce coats the linguine. Then we taste it and it gets a "B" rating as an option for dinner.

The next phase involves stepping up the sauce with some white wine - hmm - sounding pretty good. Add some fresh parsley and we have a really nice meal - moving up to a "B+".

Finally, we need to add more flavour to this dish - so we added oven roasted yellow cherry tomatoes - using that wonderful olive oil I am always talking about.

At last, we have a recipe that gets an "A-" in our house and the recipe gets added to our repitoire. This is my feature recipe for this week.

But you must be wondering how a recipe gets to be rated "A+". Well in order for this recipe to reach that level, it requires more time and preparation of the pasta -homemade pasta. We learned how to make pasta from scratch in Italy - they even use white wine in the pasta dough. It takes time to prepare and its all about kneading of the pasta dough - we might do this for a special occasion.