While I love to cook and have complex-menu dinner parties, sometimes I just want to keep it simple so I can actually enjoy my own dinner party, instead of frazzling away in the kitchen. But I still want my guests to feel like I gave dinner some special thought. So, when I decided to invite a couple of friends over after just getting back from a month of traveling, my first thought to fit this criteria: Puttanesca. It’s colorful and hearty – salty – and how can you go wrong with layers of delicious ingredients like tomatoes, olives, capers, garlic, and basil. I decided to complement it with a colorful, not-your-average-green salad. And bread with a compound butter to keep things interesting. A simple cheese plate might be a little cliché, but it fit my turnkey criteria. This menu allowed me to have most of the components ready in advance for quick last-minute assembly before serving.
Menu
3-Cheese Plate with Grapes
Penne Puttanesca (vegetarian)
Radicchio-Endive Salad with Pears & Spicy Toasted Walnuts
Ciabatta with Roasted Garlic Butter
Starting with the most time-consuming component first, I poured olive oil over a lopped-head of garlic and placed the foil-wrapped bundle into the oven to roast at 400 degrees for about an hour to get it creamy and carmelized. While the garlic was roasting, I got the tomato sauce going. During tomato season, I’ll make a quick Puttanesca pan-sauce with fresh tomatoes. But since its November, I opened a large can a plum tomatoes and poured them into a sauce pan over just-sautéed chopped green onions and minced garlic. As the tomatoes warmed up, I broke them up with a wooden spoon until they were a chunky sauce. I let it simmer on the stove about an hour.
I stirred in some pungent dried Italian Seasoning herbs to perfume the sauce. I thinly sliced some fresh garlic to add to the sauce at the end. I toasted walnut pieces basted in a paste of smoked Spanish paprika, Calabrian sweet chili power, and a pinch of ground ginger and Saigon cinnamon for tossing into the salad.
I then halved the Kalamata olives, quartered the green olives, and spooned out some capers that would be added to the Puttanesca . These went into the fridge to await final sauce assembly.
I shredded the radicchio and endive and tossed them together. I whipped up a balsamic vinaigrette – I like it on the tangy side. All stored in the fridge.
My guests arrived and we conversed while Miles Davis played in the background, noshing on cheese and imbibing a fabulous red wine of 2007 Van der Heyden Merlot that my friends brought from Napa.
After about an hour of the cocktail portion of the evening, it was time to complete the final components that could only be prepared at the last minute, to ensure freshness. While the pasta was boiling, I did a chiffonade of basil and julienned the pears to the same size of the shredded endive/radicchio mixture.
It only takes the pennette about 8 minutes to cook – and I pulled the pasta out at 6 minutes, in order to keep it al dente, and let it finish cooking in the skillet where I brought together the pasta and the sauce. I dropped the pasta into the hot skillet with a little olive oil, letting a bit of its pasta water drizzle in for starchiness. Next I stirred my prepared tomato sauce into the penne, followed by the olives/capers, raw garlic, and ribbons of basil – and turned off the heat. Did the distribution of ingredients look right? Yes.
I finished the salad by incorporating the pears into the radicchio-endive along with the toasted walnuts and tossed them all with the balsamic vinaigrette. I put one of my guests to work with the messy, but rewarding, job of squeezing each creamy clove of roasted garlic into a cube of softened butter for slathering on the ciabatta.
Dinner is Served
To accompany this rich, tomato-y feast, my generous friends had also brought one of our favorite California cabernets – a 2011 Michael David “Rapture” from Lodi.
I love this menu as a great all-around dinner party option because it’s quick and simple Italian immersion, it can easily scale up, and the Puttanesca makes great leftovers.