Spaghetti with Garlic and Bread Crumbs

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by Lisa

This recipe comes straight out of Lidia’s Italy–I have what seems like and endless stream of recorded programs, which I generally don’t get around to watching. But this weekend I did and on Sunday I made this simple, comforting pasta. It has 5 ingredients and comes together in the amount of time it takes to cook the pasta–which means it’s also perfect for a busy weeknight. It’s also made from ingredients:  pasta, garlic, day old bread, olive oil, oregano–that you will very often have on hand. You can watch Lidia cook it for Al Roker here (and add spinach to the basic recipe).  My adaptation is below. It’s faithful to the spirit and the technique of the basic recipe, but it was a rainy Sunday, so I wasn’t about to go out for bucatini, though I would have liked to, and I didn’t have any oregano dried, so I substituted parsley and sage, which may be nontraditional, but was very good. I added a side dish of cauliflower roasted with olive oil, whole garlic cloves, and seasoned bread crumbs, which would have been just as good tossed in the pasta.

Spaghetti with garlic and bread crumbs

adapted from Lidia Bastianich

  • 1 lb spaghetti
  • 3/4 loaf day old bread, shredded into coarse crumbs (use a box grater or your food processor; you might have to cut off some of the hard crust)
  • lots of thinly sliced garlic (about 6 large cloves, but to your taste)
  • olive oil
  • 4-5 sage leaves, chopped finely
  • 1 T parsely, chopped finely
  • salt
  1. Bring water to a boil. Salt and cook pasta.
  2. While pasta is cooking, pour about 1/4 cup of oil in heavy pan. The oil should coat the bottom of the pan
  3. Cook garlic for a minute or two, until it begins to soften.
  4. Add bread crumbs and cook, stirring occasionally, until bread crumbs are nicely toasted. You want them nicely browned, so they have some crunch.
  5. Add sage & parsley (or dried oregano), stir.
  6. Turn off heat.
  7. When pasta is finished, drain and add to the pan, tossing to coat.
  8. Serve on a large platter, with grated cheese.

Lemony Pancakes

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by Caroline

On the one hand, we don’t really need to offer another pancake recipe; we’ve posted two (one for pumpkin pancakes, one for a classic griddle cake). But on the other hand, I’m always interested in trying new things, and I’m wanting to put lemons in everything since re-reading Laurie Colwin last week, and these lemon pancakes just sounded delicious. And they are. If you separate the eggs (beating the yolks with the milk and ricotta, then whisking in the dry ingredients, and then folding in the beaten egg whites), they will be especially light and fluffy. But if, like me, you find pancakes enough of an accomplishment in the morning, save yourself the trouble and just bask in the lemony goodness.

Time to Slow Down

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By Lisa

Part of last week went like this:  party, school, party, no school, faculty meeting, teacher conference, mother/daughter date,  soccer, soccer, soccer, birthday party. We barely had time to breath much less cook something new for dinner. In between all this? Final edits of the page proofs were due for my book. We’ve been eating a lot of leftovers. And tacos.

I know that we’re not the only ones being bombarded with a mad rush of events right now because a friend (who’s son is a just few days younger than Finn)  had exactly the same schedule of family/kid birthday parties and tag team round of soccer games.  We all go through periods like this, where the events of our lives crowd around us like dementors, threatening to suck all the happiness out of the things we’ve actually chosen to do.  And here’s the thing:  all of the things we were doing, they weren’t chores. I love my job. I love going to my kids games & they love playing. What’s more fun than a birthday party? Or seeing your grandparents? Or a day off from school where you can mix purple potions and see how they react to various household baking supplies (and them dump them on the only good carpet in the house…? The steam cleaning I could have done without, but everything else….? Times like this I have to remind myself that most of what we do makes us happy, and we have to make time just to breathe and sleep and come together.

Last weekend we did it this way: On Saturday night, we got home from soccer in the dark & sent the kids directly to showers to wash the grime of sweat and the soccer field off them (& before the any-minute-now meltdown could get worse). They emerged clean and calm in pajamas, and we sat down to quiche (made earlier in the day & ready to go), green beans (cooked while they were showering), fresh bread, and white beans heated gently with garlic and olive oil (a perennial favorite).  I lit candles.

And  they got a kidtini for the first time in a long time.  The only thing new about this recipe was the presentation.

Bubbly water, raspberry Torani syrup, clementine slice in a sugar rimmed glass


Kory and I had prosecco cocktails, my first drink in 3 weeks, a celebration of turning in the final final version of my book. (Sugar cube + Bitters+Prosecco + lemon twist). Things actually slowed down and for forty-five minutes or so, we just relaxed, ate, enjoyed doing nothing.  Outside, it was very dark, but those life sucking dementors? They were nowhere to be found.

Pumpkin and Black Bean Soup

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by Caroline

It’s November in San Francisco, which means that I am facing the annual disconnect between the food my New England-raised body feels like I should eat and the food appropriate for our sunny and warm days. The New Englander in me says “Turn on the oven! Roast vegetables! Make soups!” while the Californian wants a salad.

This week, the New Englander won.

I’ll link to the recipe I followed for pumpkin black bean soup, with a reminder that it is soup, so you can be flexible. I roasted the smallest of our CSA pumpkins and scooped all the flesh into the soup pot, without measuring, but it was probably more like five cups. My cans of black beans are 15 ounces, not 19, so that’s what I used. I didn’t have any canned tomatoes, but did have some of last summer’s frozen roasted balsamic tomatoes (made without the leeks and pureed immediately into a sauce) which looked like about two cups (but I did not measure.) I had about a tablespoon of sherry left in the bottle, so tossed that in with a glug of last week’s Sauvignon Blanc. The soup was delicious, and it’ll never taste quite the same way as it did last night. That, to me, is one of the charms of soup.

Now he is six

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by Lisa

As Ella remarked last week,  while I was making meatballs and spaghetti, and red sauce and a chocolate layer cake, which came after the 3 dozen cookies made for his class, and after the schoolday breakfast of pancakes, but before the Wizard Party attended by 23 five-year-old boys and a few girls, “Birthdays are a lot of work for moms.”

She is right. Because Professor Mumblemore was about to leave for his European tour,  we I had two events to put together in 3 days. It was not fun. Harry Finn had a blast, especially when he was impersonating Keith Richards.

Or Harry  Potter.

The food at the wizard party was very basic: hot pretzels and apples for snack upon the 5 pm arrival; pizza; ice cream cake.  The boys and two girls were much more interested in the magic than the food. And honestly, the party was pretty magical, even if it was very hastily thrown together, and I didn’t have quite enough food for all of the parents who stayed to enjoy the festivities. (I found some bottles of wine, some hummus, some pita chips, some salamis….).

The family dinner took more time:  spaghetti and meatballs, red sauce, chard, garlic bread.  My meatballs are slightly different every time I make them, but this time I made them with 1/2 beef and 1/2 fresh sausage, to which I added lots of minced garlic, chopped parsely, bread, milk, an egg, a little salt and pepper. I make them small, bake them until browned, then finish them in the sauce, which this time was a double recipe of Marcella Hazan’s simple red sauce (large can tomatoes + 1 stick butter + 1 onion, halved; simmered together. Remove the onion before serving) made with the tomatoes I roasted and froze at the end of the summer. It was a winning combination. But I was way too exhausted to get a good picture. Below, the boy’s cake for the family party.


There’s something deeply satisfying at seeing your child transported by joy on his birthday. And while this had nothing to do with the food, and almost everything to do with building Hogwarts out of Lego, people needed to be fed, and Finn got to choose the terms, which is a privelege I’m happy to grant him once a year.

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