Pasta Frittata (leftover spaghetti)

Oh, you could microwave up that little bit of leftover pasta and meat sauce for lunch. Yes, it’d be good. You could also add a few eggs, add a little salad, and turn a so-so lunch into an elegant dinner. Here’s how:

Pasta Frittata

¾ cup leftover pasta and sauce mixed and drained of excess sauce (if you have sausage or meatballs, by all means, chop and include)

5 eggs

Oil

3 tbsp water or milk

One really good 10-inch non-stick frying pan

One dinner plate

1. Heat about 1-2 tbsp oil in a pan over medium heat.

2. Next step depends on what kind of pasta you have. If it’s long and thin, like spaghetti, do nothing. If it’s short and fat, like penne, you need to cut it up. (Otherwise, the weight of the pasta will pull the frittata apart.

3. Add pasta to oil, and heat thoroughly. You can even brown it just a bit (tastes yummy that way)

4. In a bowl, beat your eggs with the milk or water.

5. Off heat, add them to the pan and shake. Throughout the cooking process, you want to be almost continuously shaking (or jiggling, really) your pan. Then return to the pan and turn heat down slightly.

6. Using a spatula, do this: Swirl the egg around in a circle so coats the outside of the pan, then scrape the coating back down to the rest of the egg. Don’t stop shaking.

7. If you have too much liquid in the center, scramble it a little in the center of the pan. Continue shaking.

8. Finally, your eggs should be pretty set with a little liquid on top. If you’ve been shaking enough, it all should float freely along the bottom of the pan.

9. Now, off heat, clap that dinner plate over the top of the pan. Flip the whole thing over so the egg falls onto the plate.

10. Put the pan back on the heat, add a bit of oil, swirl, and the slide the egg back into the pan starting with the back edge.

11. Cook while jiggling for about two minutes.

12. Slide out and serve with wine and a salad.

Spinach Pasta (leftover pureed spinach baby food)

Babyfood. Last thing you'd think would make good leftover grub. But our 2.74 year old has proved a remarkably tough critic. According to her, we are quite possibly the worst cooks on earth. (A certain Chef Boyardee sets a standard we could never hope to equal.) This has left us with a wide range of pureed products to fashion into something edible. The class of these so far is this simple frozen spinach pasta.

Spinach Pasta

1 lb defrosted frozen spinach
6 oz cream cheese
1/4 cup pine nuts
3-4 tablespoons dried Italian spices (Any Italian seasoning works, as does even amounts of dried oregano and basil, with a generous pinch of garlic powder.)
pasta (Rotini is perfect for this)
olive oil

1. Puree spinach in a food processor. You might need to add a touch more water to get a smooth puree. Remove from processor. (Do not substitue commercial spinach baby food. It costs a fortune and tastes awful.)
2. Now put the cream cheese and about a half a cup of water into the food processor. Let it go. Add additional water, as needed, to make a creamy mixture. Remove from processor and keep separate from pureed spinach.
3. Toast pine nuts in a warm pan (low medium heat, tossing frequently until lightly browned) and set aside.
4. Cook pasta. Before draining, reserve about a cup of cooking water.
5. While pasta is cooking, heat 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil in a shallow, deep skillet. Add spice mixture and stir to toast for about 15 seconds.
6. Add pureed spinach and a sprinkle of salt and cook for a few minutes, until it loses its bright green color.
7. Add cream cheese mixture. Stir to combine and cook for a few minutes.
8. Add pine nuts and then cooked pasta to skillet, along with as much of the pasta cooking water as is needed, until the sauce-to-pasta ratio is correct (in other words, how you like it.)
9. Adjust for seasoning and serve with grated cheese.

Pasta with Celery Sauce

Throughout pregnancy, she had only two cravings. One was celery. The other was French fries topped with canned gravy and American cheese. No comment.

Back to the celery. It's really out of favor among the food elite. A few years ago, an article appeared in Ars Culinaire or one of those high-end food magazines, opining that over the years celery must have become more bitter. It explained this by saying that more and more chefs were using less and less of it, even for the classic French mirapoix. We'll leave that discussion to the experts.

Of course, celery flavor is not going out of style. Celery root has made such a lightning ascent that celeriac salad is now on the menu of every Food Network star. (Why is the Food Network the only place outside of the porn industry where everyone is a star? We must stop digressing.)

So let's embrace it. This celery pasta is cheap, dead simple like all good Italian food, and, if you've got good, minty basil to go along with it, really tasty.

Pasta with Celery Sauce
1 large can tomatoes
2 stalks celery plus some celery heart, cut in very large pieces (you're going to remove them)
1 medium onion, quartered
Basil
Salt
2 tbsp butter
3tbsp cream cheese
Parmesan (lots)
Pasta

1. Place tomatoes, celery, 1 tsp salt, and onion in a pot.
2. Simmer for 40 minutes, adding H20 as necessary.
3. Allow to cool. Pull out the celery and onions and squeeze them over the pot to get out all the juice.
4. Add butter and bring back to a simmer.
5. Add cream cheese and stir until it dissolves
6. Add grated parmesan slowly while stirring until it tastes great. (a good handful or so)
7. Cook pasta, toss with sauce and basil to taste.

Meatballs and Quick Sauce (Leftovers from 4th of July cookout)

As new parents, we took the 4th of July easy. We had family over and fed them hamburgers, hotdogs, cole slaw, and beans. Of course, they (the family, not the hotdogs) were very relieved when we announced this unexciting menu over the phone. They claim to love all food, but there's a catch: They do not consider the vast majority of things that are edible to be "food." To qualify as food, an item must be served at a diner or a pizzeria. Everything else is a dangerous and unnecessary innovation.

In any case there's nothing wrong with hamburgers and hotdogs, particularly if there's plenty of Heinz ketchup to go around. The leftovers don't need to be repetitive. In one photo, you can see how baked beans and tomatoes can turn into a yummy English breakfast (beans and fried tomatoes, mmn) . Turning preformed hamburgers and leftover buns into a quick spaghetti and meatball dinner is only slightly more of a trick.

Meatballs and Quick Sauce (Leftovers from 4th of July cookout)

3-4 leftover hamburgers (uncooked)
1 hamburger roll
2/3 head garlic, chopped fine.
¼ cup parsley chopped fine
Milk
1 egg (optional)
1 large can tomatoes
Wine or sweet vermouth
Salt
Olive Oil
Pasta

1. Pull the hamburgers apart (this is a bit more of a pain than you might think).
2. Tear the roll in small pieces and place it in a bowl and drizzle milk over it.
3. Mix meat, ½ the garlic, parsley.
4. Squeeze out the roll.
5. Toss through the meat. Add breadcrumbs if the mixture is too wet; add an egg if you prefer tighter meatballs.
6. Add salt. Heat a frying pan and fry a small amount of mixture to test. Adjust seasoning.
7. Roll out a dozen or so small meatballs.
8. Heat a frying pan, add a small amount of oil, and fry meatballs until brown on all sides. Remove, pour off fat, deglaze with a little wine or sweet vermouth.
9. Heat a saucepan, add olive oil. Place the rest of the garlic in; allow to cook for 30 seconds or so.
10. Add tomatoes, salt, and the deglazed drippings from the meatball pan. Bring to a simmer.
11. Add the meatballs.
12. Allow to cook for about 30-40 minutes until tomatoes are soft and everything is tasty.
13. Serve with pasta. (No we're not going to tell you how to cook pasta.)

Pasta with Crab and Spring Onions

Spring brought spring onions—aka Mexican onions in the western US. They look like overgrown scallions, with a big bulb and a sweeter flavor than yellow onions. That turned our thoughts to a can of crab sitting in our pantry. In an earlier use, one of the same cans had ruined a pizza. The crab was very strongly flavored and we'd balanced it poorly, leading to a fishy pie that could only be saved by a thorough drenching in hot sauce. (A crude but effective method.) Green onions are a better option for mellowing out crab, especially if you plan on tasting the crab.

Pasta with Crab and Spring Onions

1 can crab
2 large spring onions
1-2 cup milk (1% is fine, but add a small amount of half-and-half; whole milk works too)
1 tbsp butter
3 tbsp or so cream cheese
¼ cup grated parmesan
½ lb spaghetti
Flour

1. Bring salted water to a boil and cook your pasta al dente.
2. Meanwhile, finely chop the white bulbs of the onions, set aside. Then chop the greens and set aside.
3. Add butter to a hot pan, add the white part of the onion.
4. Cook for several minutes, then stir in 1 tbsp flour, adding more butter as necessary. Cook for about 1 minute.
5. Add milk, stirring vigorously to incorporate flour. Bring up almost to a simmer.
6. Add cream cheese and dissolve.
7. Add parmesan cheese and dissolve (to taste).
8. Drain pasta (reserving water to loosen sauce if necessary).
9. Combine pasta in sauce, adding extra water if necessary.
10. Toss in most of the green part of the onions.
11. Serve garnished with cheese and green onions.

Simple Egg and Leftover Pasta

If you're like us, you're not good at the art of pasta/sauce estimation. We always end up with a couple handfuls of orphan pasta that gets bagged and fridged. One of us (we're not saying which) likes to eat it with barbecue sauce and parmesan cheese. The other concocted this simple dish for lunch the other day. It'd be better, of course, if you made the pasta fresh, but that's not the point.

Egg and Leftover Pasta

(serves one, easily scaled)

1 bowl leftover pasta (if you have spaghetti or linguini, consider cutting it up)
1 egg
2 tbsp chopped parsley
Parmesan cheese
Pepper
Butter
Olive oil

1. Put the pasta a tbsp of water in a microwave and heat.
2. Drizzle with oil and toss with a good lump of butter until the butter is melted.
3. Add some of the parsley, a few good grinds of pepper, and about 1 tbsp cheese and combine.
4. Fry the egg over easy.
5. Place egg on pasta, garnish with more parsley and cheese.

Roast Brussels Sprouts Pasta (from leftover marinara sauce)

The humble, unloved Brussels sprout often finds its way to our kitchen. The bulk of the latest batch went to a potato gratin that was too blah to post. A few sprouts remained, however, and we used them to spike up some leftover marinara sauce. There's something about the slight bitterness of the spouts and the sweetness of the tomatoes that we really liked.

Our favorite marinaras come from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, a book we and, more importantly, all major food authorities recommend. The tomato sauce with butter and onion is particularly good.

Roast Brussels Sprouts Pasta

2 cups leftover marinara sauce (hopefully sweet)
10 or so Brussels sprouts
Grated fresh mozzarella, or similar cheese
Salt
Olive oil

1. Preheat oven to 400.
2. Quarter the sprouts, place on a sheet pan and toss with olive oil and salt.
3. Roast for about 5-8 minutes, until sprouts are browned. Remove and discard any burnt leaves.
4. Heat leftover marinara sauce to a simmer, add sprouts. Simmer for a minute or so, and leave sprouts to infuse the warm sauce (overcooking sprouts makes them taste like your mom's).
5. Cook the pasta al dente and drain.
6. Combine the two, heat them through, and drizzle with olive oil and stir.
7. Serve garnished with mozzarella.

Pasta with Red Clam Sauce

The in laws have recently converted to the glycemic index and have banished sugar and refined white flour from their diets (except where pizza is concerned). They even declared war on pasta, which—so the theory goes--turns humans into hippopotami in no time flat. At first, we thought we'd point out that dried pasta is actually made from high-protein durum wheat, but we had two good reasons not to. 1) They wouldn't listen anyway. 2) It allowed us to expropriate their locker of unused pasta. That included many good specimens, including a half kilo of bucatini.

That returned us to more canned clams and one of our favorite dishes. We've been kicking this recipe around for years, making it a bunch of different ways. It wasn't originally ours, but by now, we'll claim it.

Pasta and Red Clam Sauce

1 pound pasta, cooked al dente
2 cans chopped clams
2 anchovy fillets
3/4 head garlic chopped (yeah, that much, it cooks down)
1 tsp cracked red pepper
I small can whole peeled tomatoes. (Italian ones are obviously better here. If you can't get 'em or are too cheap to pony up the funds, add a small amount of sugar).
3 tbsp chopped fresh parsley
1 tbsp lemon juice (optional)
Lots of grated parmigiana
Olive oil

1. Place oil in medium hot frying pan, and add anchovies.
2. Mash anchovies with wooden spoon until the disintegrate into the oil.
3. Add garlic and pepper and sautee for 30 seconds
4. Open the can of clams—actually, have the can of clams already opened before you start any of this. Press the lid down on the clams and drain all of the clam juice into the sauce.
5. Stir and bring to temperature. Then place tomatoes in a bowl—actually, do this before you start cooking as well. Mash them really good with your hands.
6. Pour the tomatoes into the sauce. Don't add too many, you don't want to have more tomatoes than clam juice.
7. Simmer for fifteen minutes.
8. When everything tastes great, add the clams, most of the parsley, and the lemon juice.
9. Bring back to temperature and remove from heat. Do not cook the clams very much.
10. Toss with pasta.
11. Serve garnished with parsley and lots of parmigiana cheese.

Found Meal: Pasta Bits and Simple Sauce

This one goes out to all of the true skinflints in the world (Let's unite for a beer. You pay.). We'd saved leftover pasta from a couple of meals. The rest is kitchen detritus. The results were lunch.

2 cups cooked, leftover plain pasta
4-5 cloves garlic, chopped fine
2 tbsp tomato paste (When opening a can of tomato paste, don't use the whole can. Freeze the rest wrapped in plastic sprayed with oil. When you need it, cut off a piece with a serrated knife and defrost in the microwave.)
¼ cup Neufchatel cheese (or cream cheese)
1 tbsp half & half
Dried oregano & dried basil
Crushed red pepper flakes
¼ cup pine nuts
1 tbsp chopped parsley
Olive oil (unimpressive)
Sugar

1. If you have two or more types of pasta, chop it until everything is roughly the same size.
2. Toast the pine nuts in a skillet, remove and chop roughly.
3. Put a bit of olive oil in the same skillet, and cook the garlic gently over low heat.
4. When it is fragrant, but before it is golden, add the tomato paste.
5. Fry for a few moments, then add about half a cup of water. Stir to incorporate the tomato paste, and let simmer for a few minutes.
6. Season with a small bit of kosher salt.
7. Add the Neufchatel cheese and half & half, stirring to combine. Keep the sauce simmering.
8. When the cheese has been completely incorporated, add the oregano, basil, and red pepper flakes.
9. Let the sauce simmer for a few moments more before adding the parsley and about half the chopped nuts.
10. The sauce might need a pinch of sugar here. Taste and adjust the seasonings.
11. Toss pasta through. Serve garnished with more chopped nuts.

Smoky Mac-n-Cheese

After crisscrossing the world looking for cephalopod recipes, it's nice to come back to a good old mac-n-cheese. There's nothing like it for providing comfort if you need it, and tasting great if you don't. It also helps use up all of the scraps in your cheese drawer.

Every mac and cheese recipe has to fit in your roasting pan nicely. That makes writing a recipe a little bit of an exercise in guess work. We usually test the amount of pasta we'llneed by filling up the pan we're going to use. The amount of cooked pasta should be about ¾ to the top of the pot. Then we remove that to a bowl, make a little extra sauce, and combine the right amount to cover it.

Smoky Mac-n-Cheese

1 pound pasta, cooked to a hard al dente
2-3 cups grated scrap cheese, cheddar, monterrey jack, etc.
3 oz Velveeta (yes, that stuff, it adds a nice texture)
1 onion, chopped
1 tsp dry mustard
1 tbsp smoked paprika
1/2 tsp cayenne
1 tbsp flour
1 ½ cups milk (or so)
2 tbsp butter
½ cup frozen peas
Salt
½ cup bread crumbs or crumbled Ritz crackers

1. Heat oven to 400
2. Fry the onions briskly over medium high heat until yellow
3. Lower heat, add butter, and flour and stir to combine.
4. Add spices and cook briefly
5. Add milk, stirring vigorously. Bring temp up.
6. Add butter, and melt
7. Add Velveeta and dissolve
8. Slowly add cheese a little at a time, making sure it dissolves. Sauce should be thickened but still a little watery (the pasta will thicken it further)
9. Add peas to thaw
10. Taste and season
11. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl, mix, then pour into baking dish.
12. Cover with bread crumbs, dab with butter, put in oven
13. Bake about 20 minutes. If the top starts to brown too much, cover with foil
14. Allow to rest five minutes before serving.

Pasta and Spanish-Flavored Meatballs

We think there's no greater testimony to the commitment of a vegetarian than the meatball. We could with regret forgo lamb chops and pork roasts, but giving up meatballs is like giving up French fries, sex, or peanut butter. It takes character.

Whenever ground beef goes on sale, we usually grab a bunch of it, some of which inevitably ends its days as flavored meatballs. Normally, we make at least two kinds at once. This involves getting a couple of bowls, divvying up the flesh, and adding different seasonings and thickeners. Then we fry them and freeze them.

Many of them, of course, disappear in the process. There is something about a freshly fried meatball, a hunk of crusty bread, and a dab of mayonnaise that could tempt a devout Hindu, we're sure. But the surviving meatballs make an interesting ingredient for those times when you just don't have time to cook something special.

Pasta and Spanish-Flavored Meatballs

Meatballs

1-2 pounds ground beef
½ head garlic, minced
1/3 cup bread crumbs
2 tbsp parsley
1 tbsp Spanish paprika
½ tsp sumac (optional)
½ tsp cayenne (optional)
1 egg
Salt
Pepper

1. Mix, form into small balls, and fry in olive oil over medium heat until cooked through. (it's a good idea to check your seasoning by frying a small patty first, before forming the lot into balls)
2. Freeze on a sheet tray lined with parchment paper
3. Place in a zipper bag and store for future use.


The Pasta

½ pound pasta
8 small Spanish-flavored meatballs
1 medium onion, sliced
5 cloves garlic
Pinch saffron
2 tsp smoked paprika
1 tbsp chopped parsley
Olive oil
Salt
Cheese for garnish

1. Cook pasta until al dente, reserving ½ cup pasta water.
2. Sliver one clove garlic and fry in 1 tbsp oil until lightly browned. Remove and set aside.
3. Fry onion in medium hot oil until yellow.
4. Add garlic, paprika and saffron. Wait until your kitchen starts smelling great, then:
5. Add meatballs and heat through.
6. Add cooked pasta and enough water to create a thick sauce. Add salt, if necessary.
7. Add parsley and remove from heat.
8. Garnish with garlic chips and cheese.

Pasta with Octopus

The best octopus dish we've ever had was the deceptively simple Pasta con Pulpo at the Hotel Terrasol in Grenada, Nicaragua. No, it's not Nicaraguan. The chef, Victor Chamorro, is from California, where he was executive chef at uber-ritzy supermarket Drager's in the Bay Area. He and his wife, Katya, had long dreamed of moving back to her hometown and opening a small hotel and restaurant. We're glad they didn't stop at dreaming. The hotel is cozy and the food is fantastic, a mix of local ingredients and California culinary sensibility. It's worth a long stop if you ever visit Grenada, which you should do.

This is our attempt to recreate the dish. It's a fair approximation, delicious, but not as good as the original. Don't overdo the basil; it really brings out the flavor of the octopus.

Pasta with Octopus

3/4 pound thin spaghetti(cooked normally)
1cup cooked octopus, skin removed
¾ head garlic, chopped fine
¾ cup fresh tomatoes, chopped
1 tbsp basil
Salt
Oil
Cheese for garnish

1. In a large, hot frying pan, add about 3-4 tbsp oil
2. Add garlic and cook briskly for about 15 seconds
3. Add tomatoes and a sprinkle of salt
4. Cook two minutes or so, stirring
5. Add octopus, heat through
6. Add the basil and toss through
7. Add the pasta and combine
8. Serve with cheese

Chorizo Fideo with Garlic Aioli

Paella puzzles us. We've never had it except when it contained expensive, overcooked shellfish. We've never seen a recipe for it that didn't involve overcooking expensive shellfish. This all seems to be in the service of creating a crust on the $6 per pound Valencia rice that's also utterly essential for the dish. We're sure somebody makes great paella. But the list doesn't include us.

There's another Spanish (or Catalan) technique that we've always preferred to paella. We call it "fideo," which is really just Spanish for pasta. It's a kind of stew that involves building a spicy broth and then cooking inch-long sticks of vermicelli in it. They give off their starch and create a spicy goop that you mix with a fresh mayonnaise spiked with raw garlic. The combination is unctuous and delicious.

If a Catalan grandmother read this recipe, she'd probably dive straight for her rosary. But it reflects what we had lying around: a link of Spanish sausage, a half of a bell pepper, and some leftover roast cauliflower. It would have been greatly improved by a handful of bay scallops, or mussels, or calamari rings tossed in at the end, but when you don't have them, well you don't.

Garlic Aioli

Make this first, as you need time for the garlic to infuse the mayonnaise. You can substitute store bought mayonnaise mixed with garlic, water, and parsley, but it won't react in quite the same amazing way when it hits the fideo.

1 egg yolk
1 tsp lemon juice
1 cup canola oil
1 tbsp chopped garlic
1-2 tbsp finely chopped parsley
Salt

1. Place egg yolk, salt and lemon juice in the bottom of a small mixing bowl.
2. Put the oil in a cup next to the bowl.
3. Take a spoon in one hand and a whisk in the other.
4. Whisk the egg yolk mixture briskly and unceasingly, while dribbling oil drop by drop from the spoon. It should start to form a semi solid.
5. After half the oil is incorporated, you can pour the rest into the mixture in a thin stream.
6. When finished, stir in garlic and parsley and set aside for at least 15 minutes.
7. Loosen with water until it's just pourable.


Sausage Fideo

1 large sausage (uncooked Spanish chorizo—not Mexican chorizo. We've also made it with breakfast sausage, and simply increased the spicing)
1 medium onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
2/3 bell pepper chopped (all three of the above ingredients should be roughly equivalent)
2 tbsp or more chopped garlic
2 tsp each of bittersweet, sweet, and smoked paprika (or what you have)
½ tbsp oregano
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 big tbsp tomato paste
1 cup canned tomatoes, tomato sauce, etc. Puree them if you can
1 tbsp sherry vinegar
1 tsp sugar (these two ingredients are optional, but if you leave out one, leave out the other)
½ cup roasted cauliflower (optional, or substitute scallops, shellfish, etc.)

1/2 -1 pound fideo (or take the same amount of vermicelli and break it into small pieces)

Olive oil
Parsley to garnish


1. Cut sausage in slices and put oil in 10 inch frying pan. Cook over low heat to release oil, then at the end turn up the heat to brown.
2. Remove sausage and pour out most of the oil. Wipe to remove about half of what's left. (Yes, we know we're throwing out flavor, but you don't want that much flavor.)
3. Add more oil and sautee onions, bell peppers, and carrots over medium heat until onions are translucent.
4. Add paprikas and tomato paste and sautee for 2 minutes or so to bloom.
5. Add sherry vinegar and cook for 15 seconds.
6. Add tomatoes, oregano, and about one cup water.
7. Add salt and sugar, and a few pieces of sausage (again, don't add all or they'll totally take over)
8. Simmer for approximately 15 minutes, adding water as necessary.
9. Taste and adjust.
10. Add about 1/2 cup water and the fideo. Be careful with the fideo. It's going to release a lot of starch and puff up.
11. Cook until pasta is done. Add water to maintain a thick but viscous consistency.
12. Add the rest of the sausage and cauliflower and heat through.
13. Fold in parsley.
14. Remove from heat. Serve in a bowl with a good dollop of aioli. Diners should mix the two together before eating.

Leftover Pork Goulash, Take 2: Pork Lasagna

That one measly pork shoulder turns out to be the gift that keeps on giving. Combining it with some leftover lasagna noodles we had lying around proved a pretty good use. Of course, we didn't have tomato sauce or ricotta lying around, so we had to improvise a bit.

Pork Lasagna

This is enough to make a mini-plate (about 9 inches by 4 inches). It would serve 2 or 3 light eaters, or ½ a heavy eater.

1 cup shredded leftover pork shoulder
½ cup of the accompanying sauce
3 tbsp cream cheese
3 tbsp goat cheese
¼ cup buttermilk
1 tbsp chopped parsley
6 large cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp lemon zest
2 tbsp lemon juice
6 sheets lasagna
parmigiano reggiano

1. Cook the lasagna sheets according to package directions. Remove when they are still undercooked in the center, and rinse in cold water. Pat dry between towels and set aside.

2. Chop shredded pork finely and combine with sauce. Heat quickly in the microwave.

3. Warm the cream cheese and goat cheese briefly (10 seconds) in the microwave. Add garlic, parsley, buttermilk, lemon juice, lemon zest, and many grindings of black pepper, and whisk vigorously. Add more buttermilk and/or lemon juice to taste, and to make the consistency of the mixture slightly thicker than heavy cream.

4. Spritz the baking pan lightly with cooking spray. Spread a tablespoon of the cheese mixture on the bottom. Place two pieces of lasagna on this, cutting them so they fit snugly and do not overlap. Spread one third of the pork mixture on the lasagna, top this with one third of the cheese sauce, and two more pieces of lasagna. Top this layer of lasagna with another third of the pork and cheese sauce, and put the remaining two pieces of lasagna on top. Finish with the last of the pork covered by the last of the cheese. Sprinkle freshly-grated parmigiano reggiano on top of this last layer of cheese sauce. Note: as with all lasagnas, it can be assembled to this point and refrigerated for a day or two, or frozen for several months.

5. If the lasagna has been in the refrigerator, let it come to room temperature before baking at 400 degrees for 20 minutes, or until the top is bubbling and golden. Let it sit for 10 minutes before cutting.

Leftover Pork Goulash: Pasta with Pork Ragu

Occasionally we see a recipe on a cooking show that makes us drop everything, head straight to the supermarket, buy all the ingredients, and get to work. This recipe for goulash made with pork shoulder and bell peppers from Jamie Oliver was a good example. It's a pork pot roast that creates a delicious sweet sauce, and lots of it.

We made this easy one-skillet pasta from the leftovers.

Pasta with Leftover Pork Ragu

1 cup shredded leftover pork shoulder
½ cup of the sauce it cooked in (reduced bell peppers, paprika, caraway seeds, etc.)
½ lb brown rotini pasta
3 tbsp goat cheese, plus extra for garnish
2 tbsp chopped thyme leaves
2 tbsp chopped parsley leaves
parmigiano reggiano

1. Cook and drain the pasta, reserving a cup of the cooking water.

2. In a large skillet heat the pork and its sauce together until warm. Add the goat cheese and about half the cooking water, and stir until the goat cheese has melted. Add the thyme and parsley.

3. Add the cooked pasta to the skillet and combine. Keep the heat at medium-low, and add more cooking water as necessary to coat the pasta with the sauce. Season with black pepper and kosher salt, if needed.

4. Top pasta with extra goat cheese and grated parmigiano.