Cooking
For your Sunday supper: hearty pasta al sugo finto, a vegetarian ragù that’s flavorful and frugal.
Good morning. There’s a term in Italian cooking, cucina povera. It translates literally as “kitchen of the poor,” but in practice means the kitchen of the frugal, the cooking of the thrifty and unwasteful. I think of it, myself, as the cuisine of the empty nester, of the dope who once again forgot to pick up sausages during the weekly shop, who doesn’t have a pound of ground beef in the freezer, who arrives at Sunday afternoon with only a decent pantry and a bunch of oldish vegetables in the crisper.
For him, for her, for them, for me: pasta al sugo finto (above), a hearty Tuscan “fake sauce” of onions, carrots and celery fortified by mushrooms with tomato paste-thickened tomato purée. Topped with herbed bread crumbs and a dusting of grated Parmesan, it’s a wonderful autumn feed of the sort you might take in at the kitchen counter while talking on speakerphone with a child in college far away.
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Pasta al Sugo Finto (Vegetable Ragu)
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With your Sunday supper taken care of, you can turn to the rest of the week. …
Monday
It is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, and I’m nothing if not polite. I’ll toast our neighbors to the north with a recipe Elizabeth David wrote and I adapted for a tiny Thanksgiving in the States: turkey cutlets marsala, awesome with mushroom risotto.
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